Dr. Susan Finnerty:

Yes, there are children, usually of the age of 16 or 17, who are admitted to adult units. We have four CAMHS units plus two private units in the country. At any given time, the number of beds varies in those four units. It is dependent on a number of things, such as that the resourcing of the teams in the unit is high enough or that there are enough beds to admit the person. A further difficulty is that, sometimes, given the design of some of the units and if a child is critically troubled or disturbed, the unit may not be able to take somebody else into that particular part of the unit, which reduces the bed capacity.

That gives a background of what is available in CAMHS. It is not ideal that those under 18 are admitted to adult units. There is a code of practice on the admission of children. There is no adult unit in the country that would meet the standards in the code of practice because the code of practice outlines very clearly that certain therapeutic activities and programmes appropriate to that age group should be provided, and obviously they are not, and also that the layout and facilities are conducive to treating somebody under the age of 18, and they are not. Invariably, if we discover a child has been admitted to an adult unit, the unit is non-compliant with the code of practice.

In practice, we found the admissions are short in general, usually a day or two, maybe a little longer. There is really no emergency provision of beds for young people. There is one bed in Galway and Linn Dara at Cherry Orchard in Dublin provides an emergency service but not necessarily a bed. Therefore, there is sometimes literally nowhere for the child to go, so they need for their own safety to be admitted to an adult unit.

There are a number of areas in the CAMHS services, including the community services, which need to be strengthened. There will be provision of more beds with the children's hospital but we also need emergency beds and emergency provision of services to catch those young people who are in distress in the middle of the night and require somewhere that is safe for them to be until the situation can be looked at. That is where it is at the moment.