Dr. Grace O'Malley:

From my perspective, the longitudinal studies - the Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative Ireland and Growing Up in Ireland - are essential from a population point of view so making sure they do not lose funding is really important for all aspects of health. We do not have a database. Investment in technology in the health service is very limited. Going towards the new children's hospital, it would be a very opportune time to develop a database that could be used and that could also link in with GPs. It is a huge ask technically because we then need unique identifiers. Trying to get that sorted has been challenging. We need a database as we would for rare conditions or infant deaths. In 2014 and 2015, we were involved with the HSE in training community practitioners in four areas of the country. It was a pilot initiative to see whether we could work with some community health care professionals to provide services locally. It was a really interesting project. We were very much operating on a wing and a prayer. It did not involve a huge amount of planning or communication around how we might get the best outputs from it but the community teams were really wonderful. They were very committed and we did our best to try and set up a system of sorts. What came out of that was some really valuable information about understanding the community and working with it before trying to say "do it this way" and understanding the needs of that community. From that work, we have a template on how we might go further. In 2014 and 2015, the Government and the HSE did commit some funding to experiment a bit. We got a lot of learning from that and we can build on that for a hub and bespoke model or to improve community services in the future.

Failure to parent was mentioned. We very rarely see a failure to parent. It is usually around capacity issues or opportunities for parents to parent because often both parents are working shift work and there is very little time when the parents are actually in the home in many cases. We very much work with parents. From a young age, we are working with parents and linking parents in with parenting programmes around how to say "No" and behaviour. Dr. McGuire will probably have more to say.