Mr. Chris Macey:

I will make two quick points. On the mental health aspect, there are 3.8 psychology posts in the country for stroke patients in hospitals. That is for 7,500 strokes a year. There is virtually nothing in the community. We provide a bit of counselling and other organisations such as Headway Ireland and ABI Ireland do great work as well but there is very little provided. This is a brain attack we are talking about and it needs to be addressed.

We did some research with the RCSI on returning to work after stroke. One of the things we found was that employers want to help but they just do not know how. They do not know what to do and they do not understand the nature of the stroke on employees. Fatigue is a huge issue post stroke. It hits people like a brick wall and people tell say you just do not know what real fatigue is until you experience a hit at that level. Often people return to work not knowing that this is going to hit them really hard when they do and employers do not understand. They sometimes think people are swinging the lead when they are actually really struggling. We have done some case work on that and key worker programmes, where there is a liaison person between the person returning to work and the employer, can be helpful. That can straighten out a lot of things. There have been some pilot programmes over the years that have not been subsequently funded. The system knows what to do, it just has not done anything about it or invested in this area. We can see the loss of talent that comes with that and that is clear with Ms Bardon, for example. She can make a significant and important contribution to children's education and she is not getting the chance, at a time the Department of Education is looking for people and needs people. There are people there and they are not being accommodated.