Mr. Bernard O'Regan:

I will comment on that and my colleagues may want to comment as well. The starting point is that the example the Deputy gave is not an acceptable situation and not one that anybody coming in to provide supports and services wants to see happen. People are working to improve that.

I will comment on the statutory AON side first. We have to work within the legislation and the requirements of the Act. We had developed a standard operating procedure on AON, which was found in March of this year to not be compliant with the Act. That has had an impact at a time we had almost cleared the backlog and were beginning to get on top of the issue of recreating delays in the service again. We are also finding ourselves in a challenging situation whereby the same staff who we need to do interventions, which is ultimately the goal of the services, are generally the same staff who are required to undertake AON as well. We have a waiting list initiative and we have been resourced to progress it. That will lead to us endeavouring to procure, including internationally, anything we can to address the formal AON process. Professor MacLachlan might want to comment on the following point as well. We have progressed some work on clinical guidance on how clinicians might undertake the assessments themselves. That is something we are addressing through the HSE structures and under the auspices of the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC. We are engaging with the unions to progress that and we hope to bring it to a conclusion in the coming weeks.

An AON is not required under the Disability Act 2005 to access the service. A referral to the service can be made based on need. In that context, any clinician working with a child should be able to determine what a child's needs are and make recommendations with the family. The case the Deputy has used is a good example of how that might be progressed. The challenge is the availability of staffing. Teams are severely depleted and they have significant caseloads so the capacity of the teams to be able to meet the needs of children is challenged.