Dr. Fiona O'Reilly:

I thank the Senator for her question and the opportunity to give a brief overview of how we engage with the migrants about whom I spoke. Dr. Skuce is our medical director and general practitioner, GP. She works across many of our services and will be able to relate how people come to meet her as a doctor in those services. Safetynet Primary Care provides homeless services to homeless populations and people in homeless hostels. We also have outreach services, such as mobile GP and nursing services, that meet rough sleepers and bring healthcare there.

We also have a number of clinics for people who find it particularly difficult to access healthcare. We have a GP clinic in Summerhill in the HSE inclusion health hub. That area has a lot of migrants living in it who have no access to primary healthcare. The clinic is a safety net for them and it provides daily GP clinics. The Roma population is very marginalised and has quite poor health. Dr. Skuce will tell the committee about the Cappuchin centre where she runs a GP clinic and we have another clinic out in Tallaght for Roma people. We have been asked by the HSE to provide a mobile clinic in Carrickmacross.

Our work with asylum seekers and refugees comes under our mobile health and screening unit. In 2017 when Ireland was taking in Syrian refugees it was recognised by the HSE's social inclusion unit that there were lots of emergency reception and orientation centres, EROCs, around the country in small places like Ballaghderreen where local GP services did not have the capacity to take in a big number of Syrian refugees. We we did assessments whereby we sat with people for an hour, with interpreters, and packaged their healthcare needs and then passed them on for further care to the GPs. Now the GPs are doing that as a matter of course. That model actually works well. As there is no room now in the national reception centres, a lot of asylum seekers are in emergency accommodation in hotels around the city with no medical cards and no access to healthcare. Our teams are going in and providing clinics once or twice a week but this is not adequate. I will let Dr. Skuce follow up on the question about how the people we engage with get to our clinics.