Ms Carol Grogan:

By the time someone is in crisis, it is very late for services to get involved. They need to be involved much earlier. There is little capacity, and we need to consider how to build it. In our experience, adults and children in crisis are not able to access placements near home and must sometimes move quite a distance. That is traumatic because, when they are in crisis, they are leaving who they know and going to a strange place with new people providing care and support. This adds to the trauma experienced not only by them but also by their families. For whatever reason, though, these individuals need additional care and support.

Another question we need to consider is how to ensure that when someone, in particular a child, goes into a service, all information is available to the service so that it might provide the necessary care and support from day one. This can be difficult with an emergency placement. We must consider how to support people to engage with these services throughout the child’s life before he or she ever needs them. Mr. Colfer can speak to my next point. When a person comes to a service, it might be the first time he or she engages with it, so how do we reach out to those hard-to-reach families and provide that additional support?

Our remit starts when people come through the door of a residential service. The home support that is coming in will not include children, so we will not be overseeing children who are in receipt of disability services in the home. Does Mr. Colfer wish to give an example or two of children who have had to move into residential services?