Martin Daly (Roscommon-Galway, Fianna Fail)

We seem to have gone from a time when people could only get a physiotherapy appointment in a hospital in the community - I am taking physiotherapy as an example, but it is interchangeable with speech and language therapy, not as a profession but rather as a group of professions that are hugely sought after, highly valuable and hugely skilled – to a point where there are physiotherapists divested into a small health centre in east Galway where they do not have the requisite resources and are working essentially on their own. While they may have some contact with their manager, that is not an attractive role. We might need to look at finding a model that is somewhere intermediate where there are clusters of three or four physiotherapists together in a bigger centre. People may have to travel a little further, but at least they will be guaranteed a service. If someone goes on maternity leave now, for example, the post cannot be backfilled and there is a two-year waitlist for community physiotherapy. It is mad stuff.