Mr. Joe Meany:

With regard to the complaints issue, we are the same. We welcome complaints and we get them regularly. We have an easy-read complaints module system in place. Every person who uses our service is aware of that and can make a complaint to us. It goes up along the line to the supervisor and will end up on my desk. If it cannot be resolved, it will go to board level.

We started a discussion about advocacy maybe a year and a half ago and, following that, we brought in an external facilitator to discuss advocacy. Following that, we had a number of people who wanted to put themselves forward on the advocacy group. Deputy Feighan talked about meaningful consultation. A number of people wanted to put themselves forward on that committee so then they did. We held an election and the winners of the election are now the advocacy committee. They are currently working out themselves how they want to engage with a subgroup of the board. They will decide how they want to engage in that such that it is a meaningful engagement and not just lip service.

From the point of view of the challenges Ms Foyle mentioned when people decide that they do not want to come back to the service, I would put it in two issues. First, there are the people who are currently in residential services. If they decide they do not want to come back to the service, the day service staff support them in their homes. That presents a staffing deficit now in the day service because they are no longer there. Plus, the ratio, as I said earlier, might be 1:4 in the day service and now it is 1:1 in a house situation. As I said, the HSE acknowledges that, but there is no solution to it, so we are functioning every day with a staffing deficit in the day service because of that.

With regard to people who decide for whatever reason that they do not want to attend the day service and who are living in their own home in the community, that is a slightly different scenario. What we try to do there at the moment is offer what they would have got in a 30-hour week, as per the resource model. We would look at the resources given and reduce it on a pro rata basis of a one-to-one staffing going out to the house. Therefore, while they might not get the 30 hours a week, they would get a qualitative one-to-one service for those hours. The difficulty we would have is that we have no mechanism to record that within the existing system of the HSE. That is the challenge. Also, when that staff member, on a one-to-one basis, is out with that person, they are not in the traditional day service, so we lose them there again. That creates challenges for us, but we talk about the will and preference of people, and this is the will and preference of people. They are deciding that this is what they want, so it is up to us to adapt and to look at ways of managing that. It does need support from the HSE and, unfortunately, it needs additional resources in some cases.