Ms Magdalen Rogers:

I want to come back to Deputy Wynne on the situation in her region, as she had specific queries around it. I will mention two points: the first relates to the community neurorehabilitation team. We talked earlier about how the teams provide specialist rehabilitation for 12 weeks. It is a vital service. We have seen teams rolled out around the country. She mentioned the vacancies in her region, CHO 3. It is just half the team that needs to be in place. It is not that there are vacant posts. It is that they have not been funded for a full team. There is less than half of the full neurorehabilitation team of 12 whole-time equivalents in CHO 3.

The theme of our pre-budget submission this year was "right place". We zoned in on the Sláintecare motto of right care, right time, right place. We zoned in on the right place because the regional inequity is something that has been brought up by committee members throughout the meeting. It is unacceptable to us that care should depend on where you live in the country.

Deputy Wynne also inquired about the number of dedicated inpatient neurorehabilitation beds. This is a report that was just published last week by the HSE. We now have the stark, clear data on the number of neurorehabilitation beds around the country. There is no getting away from it. In Deputy Wynne's region, CHO 3, there are just six dedicated neurorehabilitation beds. There should be six per 100,000, but CHO 3 is down to 1.5 per 100,000. It is another area of the country where we see a stark deficit of inpatient neurorehabilitation beds. What does that mean? It means people outside Dublin are not getting neurorehabilitation at the critical stage when they need it, both at the inpatient stage in the community and then, as we highlighted, in the long-term piece as well.

I will ask my colleague, Ms Cotter, to speak about the impact that has on people.