Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)

I thank the Chair for allowing me in. I met Mr. Gloster in June in the disability matters committee and I raised the crisis in primary care services for young people, which overlaps both the areas of disability and health. At that stage, I knew anecdotally that children were routinely waiting up to several years across disciplines nationally, including psychology, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and speech and language therapy.

I was experiencing a lot of frustration in trying to get actual statistics on this because the HSE was returning responses to parliamentary questions that only gave figures for children waiting more than 52 weeks. We had an exchange about that. I kept following up, and I eventually received a set of responses in July that were staggering in terms of the depth of the crisis. All around the country, young people were waiting routinely up to four or five years for these services. There was one particularly jaw-dropping figure in Dublin North-West of a child waiting 13 years for psychology. This crisis is very keenly felt by families who are on the receiving end of it and by clinicians within those services.

It has kind of flown under the radar. In mental health, there has been more of a political focus on CAMHS and in disability, there has been more of a political focus on children's disability network teams, CDNTs, but all of this is interlinked. When we do not address issues at primary care level for young people who have difficulties in the mild-to-moderate range, we know that those children are more at risk of developing more entrenched difficulties and may end up requiring CAMHS or CDNT support.

I wish to ask about this matter, given that we received very clear information on it and how stark it was over the summer. There was quite a lot of coverage of it. It is cross-disciplinary, it is national, it is not just in Cork or Kerry, which was the message we got from Simon Harris when my party leader, Holly Cairns, raised particular issues in Cork and Kerry the previous year. It is actually worse in some areas than in Cork and Kerry. What has been the HSE response's to that? I want to emphasise that there is a legacy of chronic underresourcing. It is not just that we cannot find the clinicians or we are not training them fast enough. While that is an issue now, there was very serious underresourcing of primary care even prior to the official recruitment embargo, which I know from working within services.

The pay and numbers strategy has really hamstrung recruitment as well, and it continues. Through parliamentary questions, I have been trying to find out to what degree posts that were lost as a result of the pay and numbers strategy have been re-advertised and put back out there by the HSE and which have remained cast into oblivion. I have been asked follow-up questions by the HSE for clarity, but the ultimate response I get is pretty Kafkaesque. I know the statistics are being provided to the people collating the information, but I do find that very frustrating. It is a bit like the issue I raised regarding exactly how long people were waiting beyond 52 weeks. Are they waiting 52 weeks or 500, 600 or 700 weeks? This is no exaggeration. What has the HSE done in response to the very real crisis that is now instantiated clearly by those statistics? What is the situation with recruitment and recruitment restrictions? Can we get clear responses regarding posts within the HSE in primary care that have been lost or the number that have been reinstated despite the pay and numbers strategy?