Mr. Gary Kiernan:

Thankfully, the admission of children to adult centres has decreased dramatically in recent years. It used to be hundreds of children every year and, as has been pointed out, it was 29 last year. Of course, everyone wants children to be appropriately admitted to a children's centre with the appropriately skilled staff, arrangements and resources in place. What we see in the Mental Health Commission is that these admissions tend to be at weekends when resources and children's emergency admission units are not available. This is the recourse people have out of hours and at weekends when they are in desperate situations. As far as the regulator is concerned, we follow up on each and every admission of a child to an adult unit to understand the circumstances of why that occurred and what could have been done differently, and to ensure the appropriate supports are in place to reduce and prevent further recurrence. As a regulator, we would highlight that these instances have dramatically reduced in recent years and the figure has been at the same level for the last three or four years.