Mr. Damien McCallion:

There is certainly an east coast challenge that is not just unique to CAMHS and it applies to other services. There has been significant investment in increasing the number of nurses and psychiatrists, as well as an associate psychologist scheme which has seen over 140 in the last six to ten years, and I have some numbers on those. A fair bit of work has been done to try to improve that. As Dr. Burke said, one of the other challenges is that by investing similarly in our primary care services, we are finding that people are moving within the system, which often creates a vacuum for a period until posts are filled, if they can be filled.

At an overall level, one of the pieces of work, which we have talked about at other committees, is around trying to have a resourcing strategy that would increase the number of nurses, therapists and so on that are being trained. I know that, for example, the number of speech and language therapists trained every year is inadequate relative to the vacancies but that is not something we can grow overnight. It is not just training in the higher education sector and we have to have systems in place that can provide them with their clinical adaptation and training. We are also trying to invest in that this year to fill the gap because the way the education sector works, it is a four, five or six-year cycle until we generate those numbers.

We are commencing international recruitment on a more extensive scale for health and social care professionals this year, although it is a bit of an unknown on the scale we are going to try to look for it. We also have big challenges with health and social care professionals in the area of disabilities.