Ms Mary O'Kelly:

I can talk about the CHO for south Dublin, Kildare and west Wicklow. Much is happening with regard to the review of services as a result of the PDS programme and people who are really working hard to improve services. Respite is being reviewed. Two new respite houses are coming into service in our CHO. One is in the Kildare area. There are different ways of looking at respite. We acknowledge that overnight respite is not necessarily the answer for everybody. We are looking at after-school services, Saturday clubs, and reaching children and families in a different way which is a little more meaningful.

That is one piece.

We have had the engagements across CHO 7 covering south of Dublin and Kildare and west Wicklow. The 11 teams have had the engagement with families. They have invited the families in for the first engagement around the family forum. A lot has come up and there is an awful lot of learning for us in that. That is the idea behind the family forums. It goes back to the fact that no matter where people live, there should be a local forum for them. All these forums will help us meet the needs of the local population in a better way because they are telling us what the problem is rather than us making assumptions and having a blanket response, if you like, to health provision.

Regarding places like Athy, as the Senator said, this is Sláintecare at the grassroots and at its best. As the Senator saw, it is not about high-tech surgeries but the interventions that are happening on the ground to help our whole population, and to promote health rather than intervention. Where we would like to go with Sláintecare is the enhanced community care, ECC, programme. It has been very much focused on adults and older persons to date. We now need to look at the children and young persons population, be it under 18 years or under 25 years. The progressing disabilities configuration has been huge and there is still a long way to go. There is also the foundation of primary care, where the strategic development for children in primary care has been public health nursing and speech and language therapy. Other services, especially therapeutic ones, have evolved and are disparate - that is the word. They are not systematic. If we are talking about a tiered model in which we want to focus a particular service such as a CDNT on more complex needs, a foundation is needed under that. That is where we would like to go next with Sláintecare.