Mr. Cathal O'Regan:

The HSE and Department of Health were asked that several times during the proceedings. They explained that they have an initial plan which only covers, as Mr. Reid said, the limited health diversion model that is being proposed. That limited plan would have one SAOR intervention worker in each community health area. They were asked how they would cope with a more comprehensive health-led approach where more people were being diverted into the services and their answer was that they would just have to scale up according to the level of demand. There is very limited capacity in the existing framework but the HSE would understand that it would have to significantly scale up if there were a significant increase in demand, because the one thing you cannot afford to have is endless waiting lists just to access this SAOR brief intervention model.