Ms Caroline Walker-Strong:

I will answer the last question on respite care. The assistive technology aspect might be answered by my colleagues from IASLT.

On respite care, what our members are saying to us very clearly is that, by the time a respite care placement is sought by a family, they are usually in crisis. The collaboration that happens is happening in an emergency situation where a family are completely on their knees and exhausted and are reaching out for services. It needs to be done in a more planned and thought-through way for equal access to respite services across the country. We are finding that there are pockets where it is quite well serviced and there are pockets where it is difficult to get a placement. Those respite places need to be tailored for the needs of the children who are going into them because sometimes we find that a child may need a placement on his or her own, which is referred to as "bed blocking". This is not helpful because the child is not the issue there. It is the system around the child that needs to be addressed. We have had communication with the HSE about respite care. We will welcome an engagement with it about respite care in the coming weeks. We have been raising this as an issue going back as far as when Senator Rabbitte was Minister of State to address the respite care piece.

On recruitment and retention, particularly in the area of social work, there is a lot of work being done at Department level to try to address that. There are new educational streams that have come on board, notably the apprenticeship scheme in UCC. Most of the Departments now support bursaries and other types of mechanism to encourage people to engage in social work. In the IASW, we are working on improving the profile of social work and why it is a worthwhile profession to get into.