Dr. Noreen O'Leary:

There is a lot in there. A lot of it captures very much the position across the country, probably. While the Deputy can speak for her CHO, it reflects a lot of experiences.

To come to the recruitment piece the Deputy mentioned, there is a real challenge in recruiting to disability services, as we mentioned. There are issues in this regard. For new graduates and early-career clinicians, there is this acknowledgement that disability services are very challenging places to work in at present, given extensive waiting lists, staffing gaps and staff burnout, as the Deputy referred to. There is a lack of those experienced clinicians to support new staff. The knock-on effect of that is that waiting lists grow. For families, it is extremely difficult because they perhaps do not have a point of contact and are waiting longer times for assessments and interventions to even feel like they have a link to the team. That is something which has come up when parents have been spoken to. They feel they just do not know who is on their team or who their team is. There is this feeling of being a number on a waiting list.

We absolutely welcome funding in order that families can reimburse the cost of assessment because it is very distressing for families waiting a lengthy amount of time.

The Deputy referred to the urgent piece of what can be done. At a current level, we need to start looking at the inputs teams are providing and the supports they are able to provide. I am sure that across the country, there are areas where there are programmes and intervention services that are having success and there are things that are working and meeting the needs of families. We can look at that to try to see how we can replicate that. Is it a matter of providing additional resources to different areas? Is it a matter of providing training to teams? What is it that could be extrapolated that is already working? We are sure there are elements. There are undoubtedly a lot of challenges but it is about finding out what is working. In one sense, we want to ask families. We to hear from them. However, in a lot of ways, families have told us. They have told us what they want and need. They want to have access to therapies that are supportive of and tailored for their child. They want to feel that such therapies are not being universally rolled out but rather meet their child’s specific needs and that will help their child function at home, at school and will make family life easier and reduce some of that stress. We need to look at what can we then do. In a way, we kind of know what they need in that sense. They are telling us. They want timely access to interventions and assessments.

What needs to happen to start to reduce that level of burnout? Families should not have to go to their local parliamentarian in tears. Ms Nolan and I certainly have experienced this, from clinical experience of families. No clinician goes to work and wants to have someone crying in his or her office because the clinician cannot provide that person with the service the child needs. Absolutely no one wants that and it is really upsetting and distressing. We all share that concern around how much more families can take.