Dan Neville (Limerick West, Fine Gael)

I welcome the opportunity to make a contribution. There are many areas I would like to touch on but the brief time available means I must highlight the failure of the Government in respect of, and the need for a new Government to respond to, those suffering from mental illness, stress-related illnesses and those who are suicidal. We must recognise the serious suicide situation resulting from the recession. We have seen this exposed by the media in the past number of days. The reduction in the mental health services budget from 8% to 3.5% of the total health budget is a disgrace. It marginalises those with mental health difficulties and does not give them an opportunity to recover.

The treatment of mental health problems must become recovery orientated. We can compare England's 12% and Scotland's 18% of the total health budget to our figure of 3.5%. We have failed to introduce the Government's policy and the recommendations of the A Vision for Change report. The key aspect of that was to introduce multidisciplinary, community-based psychiatric services so that we deal with people in the community. All disciplines should be available and the team can decide the best type of treatment for the person at an early stage.

People ask where we will get the money for this. My reply is that because of the lack of community-based psychiatric services, people are in psychiatric hospitals who would not be there if they were treated in the community at an early stage. If that policy was introduced, we could reduce the number of psychiatric hospital beds by 500. The Ceann Comhairle can make the calculations, when it costs €1,000 a day for a psychiatric patient in hospital. Private hospitals charge approximately €500, which is paid by the VHI. We can save up to €200 million if we change the system, based on the €1,000 per day figure. We also have geriatrics, elderly, long-term patients who do not need psychiatric treatment and who need nursing home treatment.

We should bear in mind that it costs €7,000 a week for a patient to be cared for in a psychiatric hospital and if such a patient were moved to a nursing home, it would cost €1,000 a week to care for him or her. The system itself can produce the finances to introduce proper community-based psychiatric beds.

It is disheartening to read the report of the Inspector of Mental Health Services. As the report states:

[The inspector has constantly identified year after year] an unaccountable failure to implement policy which 20 years old and, as a result, prevailing conditions in Ireland's mental health services remain a scandal. The inability to change policy in the past unfortunately raises concerns about the implementation of the new 'Vision for Change' policy [which I recommended] unless the Government approaches the issues with a real will to change along with the absolutely necessary recourses [ as I have pointed out]. There is no doubt that the neglect of the psychiatric services over the last 10 years has, at its root, the decision by the Government to slash .... the Health Budget [for psychiatric services, which is totally unacceptable].

We hope that Fine Gael will have an opportunity in government to examine this. It will take time but it should be examined.

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