Ms Niamh Jones:

I will give my opinion from my work on the ground. I am not a figures or administration person. With regard to Sláintecare, we are already there. We take a very person-centred approach. We are flexible and work out of hours. I work at night and on Saturdays to provide our service. That is very important to the public reaction and its appreciation of what we provide. We are accessible. We work everywhere - in the south, south west and up to the north. I am saying that it should not just be on paper, but on the ground. It should be looking at what I am doing. My 11 colleagues and I are the people who are out providing a service that is recommended. There is much talk about being person-centred and accessible, but how many of us can do that without the resources? We need the resources to do it.

The Senator mentioned that the funding is going into main sources, whereas much of ours has to come from fundraising and other areas to provide these formalised programmes. We provide a continuum of care outside the hospital environment from new diagnosis right through the person's life. It might be a parent at the beginning. I am now meeting young adults who were children who have come through it. I am going with them into colleges and providing epilepsy awareness in colleges throughout the country. They are going into employment. I belong to a single very small organisation in the group to which Dr. McCarthy referred. Let us look at what we are doing on the ground.

I wish to get rid of a misconception that we do not work with other organisations. We need to go there and examine that. As the Senator said, ours is a very specialised organisation but we link on the ground. We have very strong links. It is not appreciated how much we link with the neurology teams, but outside those teams and in the community, we could not exist without networking with each other, education centres, acquired brain injury organisations and mental health organisations. We are linking continually. How one formalises that is the way to go forward. We are not all working in isolation. We work with people on the ground. Look at what is happening on the ground and not just on paper. Let it not be the words but the work on the ground. This is all about the person with the condition and the people it impacts in the community.