Erin McGreehan (Fianna Fail)
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I have a question on the assessment of needs and the progressing disability services, PDS, system as a whole. We are talking about reviews and the system not working. Some clinicians have expressed to various committees, or to members of committee delegations that have visited CDNTs, that an assessment of needs is not the best way for them to be seeing children. They would rather treat children, examine them and see what they need. They want to undertake focused assessments and therapies there and then.

Has any political party, group or expert body put forward any workable alternatives to what we have at the minute? I am no expert and I do not think anyone present is a clinician but something has to dramatically change because we have such a backlog. There are millions of euro in resources going into assessments of need but the children are not getting therapies. Is the Department looking at an alternative to assessments of need?

To be honest, no other party has come forward with other suggestions as to how best we can do this. To be fair to the previous Government, it did come up with the SOP proposal because it could see where we have landed today. To be fair, that is where the SOP came from. I totally understand how the SOP came about. The SOP was challenged and it was lost in the High Court, and I understand that. However, since then, I have not had any other suggestions, other than myself, the HSE and the Department trying to be pragmatic and agile and running a recruitment campaign to try to attract people. The Senator's synopsis is correct; what we have is not working either. It is important to say that.

Interventions are far more valuable than assessment. If it takes 30 hours to do an assessment of need, the same number of hours of an intervention is over a half a year of intervention. That could make a fundamental difference to a child. These are one hour sessions. That is a missed opportunity and all the while we are waiting while lists are growing. We are also struggling to get that balance between how much time is spent on assessment and how much time is spent on intervention. We are bound by a law that states that assessment is prioritised and trumps intervention. That is the way it is.

Does Ms Comiskey want to come in?