Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is welcome. I have five questions and the first is a general one on recruitment. Among the recommendations in the report this committee produced were a lot of asks for money and the Minister of State delivered an awful lot on those at budget time. However, what of the ask around effectively designing a new recruitment process both at home and abroad? It would be good to get a response on what is happening, because this is a competitive space. Lots of countries, by the way, are recruiting abroad but we need to be in that space too to bring the skills we need here for what is an increasing demand all the time.

The second question is on the outsourcing policy, effectively, because that is what it is. We are putting funds together to try to get private therapists to do the job because we do not have enough public therapists in the system. If the numbers the Minister of State gave us are correct we have a capacity in the HSE to do 3,800 assessments of need a year and then a €5 million fund to be able to source from the private sector another 1,800. Then there is a further fund of €6.89 million she mentioned to source another 2,500 from the private sector, so we are now effectively sourcing more assessments of need from the private sector than we are from our public system. That seems extraordinary. If we can find this skill set in the private sector then they are in the country. Why are we not able to recruit them given the certainty and permanence we can offer in the public sector? It is a serious question that needs an answer, though perhaps not today. We need to understand how to solve this within all the confines we must work in when it comes to public sector pay and all the rest of it. Anybody who says we should just pay them more quite frankly does not know what they are talking about, because that disrupts the whole balance of public sector pay. However, there are mechanisms and tools we can use to incentivise people working in the private sector to come into the public system and we need to be pursuing that.

The third question is my most important one. It is about the mismatch between school communities and communities CDNTs are serving. The Minister of State will be very familiar with my part of the country when it comes to some of these issues. New special schools have been set up in Carrigaline, Rochestown and a new one is planned for east Cork without the necessary therapies. Many of the children in those schools come from multiple different CDNT regions, which are geographic regions. Some of them are lucky enough to have therapists available and others are not and they are in the same classrooms. It is pot luck based on address. Some kids in a class are getting therapy and in some cases assessments of need and others are not.

We need to think about how we match school communities with CDNT communities. Everyone is trying to do a good job but the new special schools set up are, essentially, accommodating children who might come from 30 km or 40 km away, from different regional-based areas with different levels of support. There is then a difficult situation for the school and teachers in which some in their classes are getting the therapies they need at home through the CDNT structures and others do not. They do not have the resources in access to therapists in the school to manage that. That is a systemic problem in how we support schools with appropriate therapies being available versus this regional-based or area-based model in which network teams are doing their best with limited resources. It is a structural issue that needs to be addressed. It is only partially addressed by just giving schools more therapists. That helps but it does not deal with the fundamental mismatch. The reason this has become a problem is that there was a real shortage of places in special schools and we were forced, in some cases by parents going to court, understandably, to demand education for their children. We set up new special schools at relatively short notice which provide an educational resource for children who could not get into schools in their areas but sometimes travel very long distances as a result, from different geographical areas in terms of CDNTs. There is an issue in that regard that needs a response. In the short term, it is outsourcing, which is what the Minister of State has been trying to do. To be fair, I think she has been hugely frustrated in trying to solve this problem. The special school in Carrigaline still has the same problem it had nearly two years ago. There are 48 children there, a small number of whom have access to the therapies they need.

The next question relates to the input of families and people with a disability as we develop policies. It is an important principle. The Minister of State is extremely approachable, meeting families and so on. Perhaps it is already, but it should be structured into the decision-making process. If we are changing or improving models, there needs to be a panel of families and people who manage disability in their lives and families so that we can test the practicalities of the changes and improvements we are trying to make.

The other question is technical. Recommendation 23 states that we have a national ICT database around assessment of need. Perhaps it already exists. Do we have a clear picture of who is asking, who is getting, what the gap is and where it is? Is there a live database that gives us that information? If we do not, it is very hard to plug those gaps quickly.