Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In 2012, a special allocation of €35 million was provided for mental health, to be used primarily to further strengthen community mental health teams in adult and children's mental health services, to advance activities in the area of suicide prevention, to initiate the provision of psychological and counselling services in primary care and to facilitate the transfer of mental health service users from institutional to community-based care in line with A Vision for Change. A total of 414 posts were approved to implement this €35 million package of special measures. As of 31 May 2013, 385 of the 414 posts either have been filled, are under offer or are awaiting clearance. The national recruitment service, NRS, of the HSE creates national panels in anticipation of vacancies. On occasion, however, it is difficult to fill some posts for various reasons, including geographical location and international shortages of some grades, notably clinical psychologists. The NRS is currently working to ensure that the remaining posts will be filled as soon as possible, subject to the availability of appropriately qualified candidates. In some cases, alternative arrangements may be necessary for posts that cannot be filled in the normal way.

Candidates for these new posts were asked on application to include details of their current employers. However, at the appointment stage this data may not be current and cannot be validated. Accordingly, it is not possible to indicate the number of the successful candidates who were already employed by the HSE.

It is currently the responsibility of the HSE's regional directors of operations to decide within the context of their current resources whether to fill vacancies that may arise as a result of the appointment of an individual to a mental health development post from 2012. Each director has been asked to consider favourably the back-filling of posts vacated by the appointment of individuals to new mental health development posts to ensure that the objective of enhancing general adult and child and adolescent community mental health teams will be maintained.

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