Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)

I thank the Senator. There are issues in Cork but there are other counties and people listening in around the country saying that they have issues in their area too. We need to ramp up the funding and the forward planning for respite, day services, residential care, independent living and ensuring that it works not just for those areas but to enable people so they do not have to go into residential care. It is all about that preventative early stage intervention.

The Senator talked about access to assessment of need and the backlog there. To be frank and categorical about this, the assessment of need process is not working. It is broken. I have met Cara Darmody on a number of occasions. I absolutely agree about her campaign. It is just not addressing the needs of young people who want to access these services, get the assessment and access these therapies. With my Government colleagues, I have been looking at the assessment of need process. Work on that is under way. It may require legislative change. We have not figured out the detail of that, but there are a number of things that we need to look at.

This is not just about dealing with the waiting lists. Just dealing with the waiting lists will not solve this problem. We need to look at the provision of therapists, particularly occupational therapists and speech and language therapists. We have recruitment and retention issues. The HSE is carrying out recruitment drives domestically and internationally. We are looking at the provision of more assistant therapists and at innovative ways to ramp up the number of therapists across the system within our children's disability network teams. When I was in special education previously, I would have done work that my colleague, the Minister, Deputy Helen McEntee, is doing, putting therapists into special schools, including speech and language and occupational therapists. They go into the special schools that need this therapy most and then roll it out to special classes and mainstream schools.

We have bursaries for postgraduate students to encourage them to stay on in the CDNT system. I want to see more student therapists as they are going through their third level experience getting experience working in CDNTs and acute settings. They would get a wide range of experience as a therapist so that they get a real sense of it. If I am quite honest, some of the feedback that I am getting is that it is a difficult space to work in, and it is. It takes a particular type of person with experience. If you have never worked in CDNTs and the community, there may be a fear around it. It gives students that exposure to this through their third level training on this. We are working on a number of things. If the Senator has any suggestions, I am wide open to ensuring that we get the recruitment and retention, and that children and adults get the therapies they need.