Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 7 March 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Future of Mental Health Care

Mental Health Services: Discussion (Resumed)

1:30 pm

Dr. Roy Browne:

I worked for nearly 30 years in the health services. I started off in the Eastern Health Board, which then got divided into three, then four and then across the country into nine. The system is now getting regenerated in a smaller number of community health care organisations, CHOs, over time. They will eventually be linked back into hospitals. There has been a burgeoning bureaucracy and, often, a management structure that is not sure what it is managing. We are nearly back to where we were once upon a time where we had a health board for a local area and there were inputs from the carers, the politicians, the people who used the health service and the experts' managers.