Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have heard the comments and seen the report on that. It is an area I would not get into, in terms of correct grammar or whatever.

I have had some discussions about the Manning group. There might be different views about who should chair it, and I am following through on that. I hope it can be established very quickly. I thought it might happen before the Christmas break but it did not.

In regard to mental health, I understand the point the Deputy made. Substantial funding of €115 million and more than 1,100 posts have been provided for in this area since 2012. Significant additional funding will be provided for mental health in 2017, which means that the HSE funding for this key care programme will increase to €851 million in 2017. It was never a case of not being able to spend the money that was allocated. The Minister of State, Deputy McEntee, is working hard on this area.

In regard to youth mental health, further improvements in child and adolescent and adult services, services for older people and further enhanced out-of-hours responses to those in need of urgent services, the service plan produced by the HSE in respect of the strategy Connecting for Life provides for improved early intervention for youth mental health, including embedding the Jigsaw site for young people and the development of primary care based therapeutic responses.

There will also be increased services to meet the needs of those with severe and enduring mental illness and complex presentations and improved specialist clinic responses to clinical programmes. Improved regulatory compliance and incident management in the HSE will strengthen the governance arrangements to improve performance and the effective use of human, financial and infrastructural resources.

The Deputy is aware that the Minister for Health set out his view that we should develop a ten-year action plan for health. Given that the population is ageing and increasing in number, we will have to decide what the scale of capital investment will be in order to provide real opportunity in the health service over the next ten to 15 years. Primary care centres are built for a purpose, namely, to keep people out of hospitals. The Minister made the point that GPs have not had a new contract for many years, and he wants to focus on that.

It is a fact of life that energetic GPs should have at their disposal the opportunity in primary care centres to carry out diagnostics, X-rays and many other things that would mean people could avoid going to hospital or accident and emergency departments in the first place. There have been some comments about the necessity to bring people to accident and emergency departments late at night when no other services are available. That is an issue on which the Minister for Health is focusing.

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