Dr. Susan Coote:

I can comment about the Limerick team on the ground. St. Camillus’s hospital is an over-65s rehabilitation facility and the team is based in the grounds of that. All the disciplines sit in the same office and there is a physiotherapy gym, an occupational therapy treatment room and individual rooms for speech and language therapy and psychology. They meet as a team to discuss patients' needs, and as a team with the individual to establish his or her goals, in order that everybody on the team is working towards the individual’s rehabilitation goals. The Limerick team has been established for a long time but is not at the staffing levels recommended in the latest documentation. Even though it exists in Limerick, therefore, it does not have its full complement and needs to be enhanced.

Unfortunately, waiting lists in Limerick are now up to six months, which is not ideal, although it highlights the demand for these teams and how important they are.

In terms of the outcomes, people are going home and living active lives in the way they want, people are going back to work and people are walking again because they have this input, whereas if they did not, they would be wheelchair users. Again, it is about the impact for the person living with a neurological condition, but also the impact for the health service. For example, somebody who requires two people to get from their bed to the chair may achieve independence in that transfer through community neurorehabilitation. That has obvious benefits in the health system and in terms of the need for carers but it also has an impact on the family in that, for example, the husband can return to work because the wife is now independent. The impacts are huge and wide-ranging. It is important that it is at the level of people being able to get onto the floor to play with their children and grandchildren, to go back to work, to walk or to dress themselves. That is what we are talking about, and those are the outcomes that are achieved by the existing teams working together.