Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

If you lived above in Inishowen, which is a huge challenge for us at the moment, you should be able to access a community-based disability team that has a speech and language therapist, an OT, a physiotherapist and access to psychologist. It should not be all urban-based, so to be very fair to the HSE 91 of those teams have shown flexibility. The flexibility is the teams of specialism where we now have a PDS team for children who are hard of hearing. We now have specialist teams for children who have vision impairments. We have also expanded what the definition within PDS of how respite would look with PDS, the after schools model, the breakfast clubs, working with the toddler groups and working with weekends and siblings.

To be very fair, there are elements of it that have worked really well and worked outside that centre-based approach. However, it is about when we go back to certain fundamentals of it where people need continuous interventions - and it is not just all children in special schools, as there are children in mainstream education who have highly complex needs as well and need a team that has full capacity and resourcing on it. That is why I will go back to the assistant therapy piece. When we have a finite resource of therapists we need to have that agility to be able to have somebody as an OT, physiotherapist or speech and language assistant who can roll out the programme that can assist the teacher and the parent but, most importantly, can provide that intervention for a child. I will give an example of it. Verbal dyspraxia is one of those pieces where if you have regular intervention for a two-year term you can actually help promote the language and it is a very successful piece. When we were doing PDS and taking all the therapists out of schools people forgot that primary care had therapists in 63 mainstream schools around the country. They are still in operation. They are still delivering speech and language therapy to junior and senior classes in primary education. It is working really successfully. There are class sizes of seven. The outcomes are phenomenal. That is a really good model that should be built upon. When I see what has happened I keep pushing the boundary here to reinstate all the 221. I am not saying education holds the clinical governance. The CDNT should hold that at all times, but they should be in the schools during the school day to ensure the children get the interventions that are required.