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

I wish to say once again that budgetary and other pressures within the HSE delayed the full utilisation of the €35 million that was allocated in 2012 and 2013. The underspend in planned mental health expenditure and the timing of the recruitment of staff developments can be attributed to the time required to get various programmes up and running. I refer, for example, to the counselling in primary care programme, which is one of the most successful programmes we have put in; the enhanced teamworking programme, which has also been hugely successful; the successful mental health information system programme, which should have been in place many years ago; the clinical programmes; and the opening of additional inpatient beds in the area of child and adolescent mental health services.

The provision of additional funding of €35 million in budget 2015 will bring to €125 million the total investment for mental health services since 2012 for the development and modernisation of services in line with the recommendations of A Vision for Change, mostly through the provision of additional posts to strengthen community mental health teams for adults and children. The additional funding is also being used to enhance specialist community mental health services for older people with mental illness or those with an intellectual disability and mental illness, forensic mental health services and suicide prevention initiatives. I believe these things should have been in place many years ago.

At the end of September, an additional 770 posts of the 990 posts provided for in 2012 and 2013 had been recruited, with the remainder at various stages in the recruitment process. There have been difficulties in identifying some outstanding candidates for geographic and qualification reasons.

Therefore, duty has been taken up in approximately 77% of combined two-year posts.

While €20 million was provided for mental health services in 2014, the HSE national service plan outlined that this expenditure would be phased in to allow the HSE to live within its overall available resources. Accordingly, it was decided that the recruitment of the 2014 posts would be commenced to provide for the posts to come on stream during the last quarter of 2014. To this end and informed by the analysis, 200 posts have been identified from the 2014 allocation and the recruitment process has commenced. It is important to stress, however, that the entire underspent funds have been made available to mental health services for spending in 2014 and subsequent years. They have not vanished.

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