Ms Caroline O'Reilly:

Following on from what Dr. Lambert was saying, having interagency work is vital but having multidisciplinary teams within organisations is also really important. It works really well. Clients who access a service are often running across town, or are expected to, to have their basic needs met. The bulk of what clients need could be under one roof. The organisation I work for has a multidisciplinary team within my department for addiction, social work, psychotherapy, play therapy and a mental health team. Then for the youth service we have a team that works with young people on the ground. They do after-school projects and summer projects and work with the schools to help prevent early school-leaving. We also have an education and training department that caters for early school-leavers who do local training initiatives or community employment schemes. It is a one-stop shop. A person or their family can use every aspect of the service. It works by duty referral where it is a social work-led duty system that is nine to five every day with a drop-in service. That system works exceptionally well for particular client groups who are marginalised and have issues of trust with services. It needs to be adopted or looked at being adopted as a model of best practice, especially in this area, because it covers all aspects of biological, psychological and social issues, which is what we are looking at here.