Ms Sarah McGillivary:

As I said in my opening statement, what is really important for our service users is continuity of care. As Ms Murphy has touched on, people should not be retraumatised every time they come back to a service. There is an assessment form that we and some other services use. It is designed to follow and stay with individuals so that they are not traumatised by having to tell their story time and time again every time they go somewhere new, while not really moving forward.

Our service is funded yearly. Our funding stream is not secure. That causes quite a high level of anxiety in light of the society we are now living in. That is another thing I named in my opening statement. Why should the counterparts of our staff at Chrysalis get 20% more in salary than they do? Are other services more financially attractive? Of course they are. How can we expand the four-hour dual-diagnosis clinic we currently have in the north-east inner city? Could we expand it to two days? We do not have the finances to do so. The first thing we, as a service, want is the security of ongoing and permanent funding so that people feel secure, safe and able to put their best foot forward going into work every day, rather than having to worry about whether they will have a job next year. That is not a worry our staff need. The job is difficult enough without the financial burden of worrying about contracts from year to year.

In addition to the clinic we hold on a Thursday, we applied for community enhancement funding, which we were lucky enough to get, to develop a dual-diagnosis group, allowing us to see more people. Obviously, groups need to be maintained at a safe number so we can have a maximum of 12 participants. We run these groups weekly over a three-month period on the platform of the Seeking Safety model, which was originally designed to treat substance use and post-traumatic stress disorder. We could run that group more often, two or three times a week, if we had official funding to do so. Those who currently facilitate that group are also case managers within our service. This is an add-on to some case managers' current role and remit that they are essentially not paid for.

We also need to enhance training. With Recovery Academy Ireland, we are currently looking at how to build on capacity training, what it is and how we can access it. As an organisation, we got mental health first aid training last year and it cost an arm and a leg to train staff in something so obviously important to the field we work in. What we took away from that training is that we knew it all already but had to pay a lot of money to get a certificate. The training budget is extremely low. The majority of our funding currently goes on salaries. For anything outside of that, we have to be very careful about what we might be taking funding away from. Overall, we need security in contracts, for statutory bodies to provide security and appropriate recognition or acknowledgement.

That is what we need to be able to move forward as a service and to deliver to the cohort of people looking to access care the gold standard of case management and dual diagnosis that Dr. Mac Gabhann spoke about.