Professor Malcolm MacLachlan:

I thank the Deputy for the question. It is instructive to look at some of the statistics. We have about one third of children on waiting lists to receive services and we also have about one third of posts on CDNTs vacant. I do not suggest it is an exact match but if we had those CDNTs fully resourced, then we would probably be able to provide services to everybody who needs them.

In developing the protocol, we do not want an approach whereby every child gets the same number of hours of assessment. It is important that the assessments are tailored to the complexity of the presentation. A challenge we had before was that we had assessments that took 60, 70 or, in some cases, over 100 hours and clinicians would feel a thorough assessment required that level of detail. The protocol we have been developing involves a tiered approach where some children could be assessed in as little as three hours and others may well take over 100 hours. It is not simply a matter of drawing the average. We are trialling the protocol that has been developed. For the 19 people who have gone through the protocol at the moment, 11 have been assessed at tier 1. That is within a five-hour timeframe, maximum. Those people might have taken ten times that long to be assessed had we not developed that protocol.