Dr. Rosie Gowran:

The Cathaoirleach mentioned nothing about us without us. The HSE is moving to engaging people, particularly with the development of the patient forum. There was a conference recently on engaging people with disabilities and patients in relation to access to the health services more generally. We also have the disability services quality improvement office which works with people. It recently held its conference, a national share day, which was related to the decision-making Act and looking at how to support people to access their will and preference, make their decisions and be supported in the right way. That involved people with disabilities across the life course on issues such as opening a bank account and moving to independent living while being supported through the decision-making office and supported through the services. It was a real showcase of how this is working well and engaging with people with disabilities.

I mention the work IDS-TILDA is doing in Trinity College, not only producing good research and evidence and making recommendations, but also engaging with people with intellectual disability in the process of co-design and developing resources and plans for implementation. As part of the clinical programme for people with disabilities, we work in partnership with it to look at how we can utilise the resources it has developed and co-produced with people with intellectual disability to actually implement some of the recommendations it made.

Regarding the clinical programme and engaging with people we have an interdisciplinary engagement. We are working with health and social care professionals, people working in medicine and nursing, also the disability organisations and people with lived experience. We are setting up subcommittees across the life course looking at children's services, young people's services, services for adults and services for older people. It is interdisciplinary, not just looking at discipline specific involving the key stakeholders with expertise in the different areas. We are bedding those down at the moment.

We will have a programme of work in 2025. Part of the role of the clinical programme is to look at the immersion and embedding of the UNCRPD across the whole sector to create an integrated approach to engage people in understanding a rights-based approach to health and social care across the sector, across the Departments and so on. Part of my role is to link with all the stakeholders across different sectors to look at what needs to be done on education, accessibility and all the things that need to happen to ensure our health and social care services are rights based and accessible to all people. For people with disabilities and all the things that have been mentioned this evening on good healthcare, accessing healthcare on time, getting assessments on time and getting proper intervention, we need to ensure that we are doing those in a way that meets everybody's needs across the life course. That is critical in the role we have.

There is another factor there with education and training. The Cathaoirleach mentioned the concern over people dying younger and not accessing healthcare. I again refer to the IDS-TILDA work on health, access to screening services, access to oral health and all those elements. Some really important work needs to be done on education and training of all health and social care professionals and all people working in the sector. We need to look at how we can create a resource.

I can give an example from my own work as an associate professor in occupational therapy in the University of Limerick. I have done a lot of work on the provision of assistive technology for people with disabilities, particularly wheelchair service provision. In my previous role, I spoke to Government about the research I had conducted.

Part of the work that I have done is set up a postgraduate education programme for health and social care professionals and engineers, and a microcredential now, hopefully, for suppliers of wheelchairs to get the right information. That has been funded through Springboard, which is important in relation to people being able to access appropriate education and training for particular aspects of the work that they do. For example, we could look at that in relation to oral health and who needs to have that information and creating programmes because without that, we may think that people understand what the UNCRPD is, how to support people or how to communicate with people with disabilities. It is important that we do across-the-board information and training at different levels suitable within the sector for its entirety and engaging people with disabilities in that process to co-design appropriately in relation to that. That is really where we need to go in relation to developing services for people so that it is inclusive, it is rights based and it is access for all.