Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)

Child and adolescent mental health services are the direct responsibility of my colleague, the Minister for Health, in conjunction with the Minister of State with responsibility for disability, equality, mental health and older people. I work very closely with both Ministers, as I do with all Government colleagues, in regard to children's matters. Nevertheless, specific responsibility in regard to child and adolescent mental health services resides with the Department of Health and the Health Service Executive. I am aware that €35 million extra funding has been made available for mental health and that child and adolescent mental health services are a priority area for investment.

Key to the development of child and adolescent mental health services is the establishment of multidisciplinary community-based teams, of which 61 are in place. Special funding allocated to the HSE in 2012 will in part be used to strengthen these community child and adolescent mental health teams by ensuring, at a minimum, that at least one of each mental health professional discipline is represented on every team.

In the context of the establishment of the new agency, consideration has been given to the interface with specialist health services to improve the experience of children and families. In this regard, the task force on the child and family support agency recently met the HSE's assistant national director for mental health and the national clinical director for child and adolescent mental health services. I understand they had a broad-ranging discussion on the development and the interface between the child and family support agency and these services. The national children and young people policy framework being developed by my Department in association with other Departments will complement this effort. As part of this process, we will outline the interaction that must take place to ensure children have access to services. The framework will be published this year and cover a five year period. It will address the issue of priorities across children's services and the need for linkage to ensure services are delivered in a joined-up fashion, much as we discussed earlier in regard to speech and language services.

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