Professor Malcolm MacLachlan:

I thank the Deputy for her questions. I fully agree that the New Brunswick model she described is very attractive. It is also consistent with the development of the children's disability network teams. One of the ideas behind those teams is to deliver on the ethos of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD, which stresses delivering services to people in their community so that children with disability can live fully as members of their community and interact with other children like them. The introduction of the CDNTs is a key element of that. Clearly, we are talking from the health service side, and there is also an education side. From the health service perspective, the New Brunswick model would be entirely consistent with what we are interested in doing.

The Deputy mentioned some concerns about consultation. In the last year the HSE established the new national clinical programme for people with disabilities. That programme's function is clinical design - designing how services should be delivered. This programme is different in a number of ways from other clinical programmes in the HSE.

With regard to consultation, for instance, we have three service users, four service providers and several different professions. We have the confidential recipient and our chair is a person with a disability and is independent of the HSE. We have designed the system like this very deliberately to have good consultation and representation of other voices. Our clinical design is very much grounded on identifying the needs of people with disabilities. In the future, members will see a significant level of interaction and consultation with people with disabilities. That has been going on for several years so it is a question of it being built on and formalised by the clinical programme. The symbolism of formalising it is really important.

Dr. Morgan referred to some work that the National Clinical Programme for People with Disability has been doing on remote working during Covid. I absolutely agree with the comment that Covid has really hit children, their families and their carers incredibly hard. We have clinicians who were not very familiar with remote working before Covid. When we surveyed staff, we discovered that of the 88 respondents who were clinicians working on the front line, fewer than one third had experience of doing remote work. Now, at this point in the Covid pandemic, all but two are working remotely. Remote working is not in any way a substitute for person-to-person interaction but it does have some benefits in that it has allowed us to reach out to a broader range of people. It has allowed parents to attend sessions that they were not able to attend before, for instance. In future, we want to take on board some of the lessons and benefits. These relate very much to inclusion value and the participation of people with a disability and their supporters. The model of care we are trying to promote involves putting children and families first and seeking to serve them in the community rather than in a specific location.