Séamus Healy (Tipperary, Workers and Unemployed Action Group) | Oireachtas source

Children and young people are being failed by our mental health system. For the past three months since February, young people experiencing mental health difficulties have been admitted to the paediatric ward in South Tipperary General Hospital. Today, there are three young people on the ward. There have been as many as five and their lengths of stay have been as long as eight weeks. The reason for this, as we all know, is that there are simply not enough inpatient beds for young people with mental health difficulties.

Admissions to the paediatric ward in South Tipperary General Hospital are totally inappropriate. Nursing staff do their best. They are kind, compassionate and caring but they are not trained to provide mental health care. Parents, usually mothers, must stay on the ward overnight to give support to their children. Of course, there are knock-on effects in delayed admissions for other patients. Every day, young people with mental health difficulties do not receive the age-appropriate timely services and supports they need. This causes psychological and social damage to these young people. It has a detrimental effect, not just on themselves, but also on their parents, their siblings, their schools and their communities. Of course, it reinforces the whole stigma regarding those with mental health difficulties. Children and their parents face immense challenges to get an adequate, or indeed any, service. Due to this, many children carry those difficulties into their adult lives.

We all know what needs to be done. We have had report after report. The problem is we have had no action on those reports or their recommendations. I remind the Tánaiste that to tackle this significant issue, we need additional inpatient beds for children and young people with mental health difficulties and 24-7 crisis intervention teams providing rapid assessment for those children and young people. We need a comprehensive primary care counselling service and a fully staffed existing child and adolescent mental health teams. We also need to resource and support, including financially, community and voluntary organisations working in these areas. We need a designated leader - a tsar-type arrangement - whose sole duty and responsibility will be to drive the implementation of these measures to ensure our young people get the services they deserve and need urgently. It should be like how cancer care services developed recently.

When will we see these measures being implemented by the Government?

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