Ms Paula Hilman:

In terms of the two pillars that are ongoing at the minute, there is potentially a third pillar that we could look at, which is having health staff involved. We have four regional control centres in the country and having health staff in those control centres who could access health data to assist in the response to calls is an option. In terms of the two pillars, the reactive patrolling one which is the response to the calls - the committee has heard about the 40 individuals we have helped - obviously it would be with health and the resourcing issue around that needs to come out in the evaluation. As I said earlier, we will look at the evaluation of that but, internationally, that type of model really works in city environments and especially at weekends. Without pre-empting the evaluation, to roll it out 24-7 right across the country is not what the lived experience of that type of project has shown. We will look at the evaluation. There is something we feel we could do sooner or more quickly and we have been looking at it and discussing it with the three pilot local community safety partnerships, the forum. There are the reactive calls and the CAST forum. The forum is where the agencies come together and look at people who have been referred through CAST or people who we know are high-end service users who are calling An Garda Síochána or other emergency services a lot. We currently have 11 people on that whom we are helping through the forum. We think there is a great opportunity as the local community partnerships roll out to have that type of forum, using the structure of those partnerships. The three pilot partnerships in Longford, Waterford and the north inner city have had a lot of engagement with support forums, or hubs, as they are called, in Northern Ireland, who work alongside their policing community safety partnerships. As they were formed, they did a lot of engagement. They did a cross-Border conference on community safety. There is an opportunity to do that even more quickly.