Ms Rosalind No?l:

I wish to reiterate what my colleagues here have said on that career pathway for occupational therapists as well as speech and language therapists and psychologists. The posts being designated to the CDN teams seem to come through into very piecemeal drip-fed way.

We need to look at the structure and what is needed in each team as regards how many occupational therapy posts, speech and language therapy posts or psychology posts are needed for a team. There does not seem to be any co-ordinated thinking through of the issues related to the filling of posts. It can be hard to attract people to a team when they know they might be the only clinician in their field because there are no others. That makes it hard to attract people.

I will comment on the AON piece. It has been found that when intervention and access to services is working well for families, the need to go down the assessment-of-need route decreases. PDS changed access to services as it not diagnosis-led. A diagnosis is not needed to access services. That is what is happening on the ground. Children and families access services without a diagnosis. The assessment of the child and a relevant diagnosis can and does happen in a fluid way when the system is working well. When it does not work well, families will push for what they can, services that have a legal framework. There is no legal framework for the provision of intervention so there is a real mismatch. Families are looking for intervention. Diagnosis is important for accessing appropriate education placements and for children trying to access early intervention, such as preschool and national school specialist classes. That is when it is necessary to understand what a child's needs and disabilities are. People are then trying to fight a system that is backlogged with intervention and assessment, all being completed by the same people who are very few on the ground.