Dr. Cathal Morgan:

We have a census of the number of people working in the system. If we extrapolate the early intervention posts, which are the clinical grades working in children's disability services, we get a figure of just under 1,200. The National Disability Authority has done a lot of good work to estimate need for services and we will need an additional 400 therapy posts in the next three years or so. These will be across the range of disciplines such as psychology and occupational therapists, etc. Given the emphasis that has been placed on ASD, there is no doubt that we need to look much more clearly at behavioural support management. Parents talk to our clinicians every day of the week and tell us that, while assessment and diagnosis are important, they want help and support. The literature confirms that behavioural management supports are critical in the context of ASD. As Ms O'Neill said, while assessment is important, we need to intervene much earlier.

As to whether sufficient grades are coming through, we have panels but many people could be sitting on panels who are working for other services on temporary contracts and there could be a displacement effect. We need to carefully examine the degree to which those panels could result in a net throughput. We also have to link into training colleges to determine how many are coming through to meet our demand.

Deputy Donnelly asked us to go through the statistics and I can follow up on this in writing. We have broken the figures down by county. CHO 1 is the area covering Cavan, Monaghan, Donegal, Sligo and Leitrim.

There were 203 overdue assessments at the end of April.