Dr. Karen McAuley:

I want to come back to Deputy Ward’s previous question in regard to what is provided for under the general scheme in terms of the prospective admission of children to adult facilities. I want to reinforce one of the points that Dr. Muldoon made earlier. Members will recall there was a Private Members’ Bill dating back to 2016, the Mental Health (Amendment) Bill 2016, which was examined by a previous Joint Committee on Health in 2019. We submitted our observations on the Bill, which had the best of intentions and was not endorsing the admission of children to adult facilities. What it was doing was recognising that the practice occurs and seeking to put safeguards in place regarding the admission of children to adult units. One of the concerns we expressed at the time was that an unintended consequence of doing that would be to establish a legal basis, if we like, for admitting children to adult units. In effect, the current general scheme will do just that and it will establish a legal basis for doing it. Therefore, while we acknowledge that, under the general principles, one of the guiding principles is to try to ensure that children are admitted to age-appropriate facilities, the “in so far as practicable” piece that the Deputy referenced earlier, as well as head 128, which is the dedicated head in Part 8 dealing with the admission of children to approved adult facilities, effectively legislates for the admission of children to these facilities.

Our concern, as Dr. Muldoon mentioned, is that if we legislate for this, it may exacerbate what is already a protracted delay in implementing the measures and putting in place the resources to allow for an end to this practice. We have to be very careful about the potential unintended consequences of legislating for the admission of children to adult units.