Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy and I acknowledge that he has consistently raised this issue of a chronic shortage in his area with me for many months and acutely so in recent weeks. I am glad it has been resolved and I look forward to working with him and the CHO management team if the Deputy will instigate same to try to develop a pilot.

I will give an example to the House of telepsychiatry and what I am referring to because I have visited New York and other places looking at how it works. My ambition is to see a hub established in, say Dublin, where there would be a consultant psychiatrist on duty 24 hours a day and consultant psychiatry can be beamed into six or seven emergency departments, so that if a child or a young person in psychosis presents to an emergency department, a trolley or a cart with a screen on it will be brought up and a consultant psychiatrist will be there live and will diagnose, treat, prescribe and admit, if necessary, and that consultant psychiatrist in the hub can cover six or seven emergency departments as opposed to us trying to have a consultant psychiatrist in each one of those emergency departments 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to cover the two or three cases that might present in any given 24-hour period. This is how they are tackling the shortage in other countries and in Ireland we have to be forward thinking and brave in this as well and embrace that new technology and new thinking. It has been done elsewhere and we do not need to reinvent the wheel. We just need to take up the challenge as opposed to trying to do what we always did because we will always get what we always got, which is not satisfactory and is not good enough as far as I am concerned.

I look forward to working with the Deputy to roll out some of these initiatives in Carlow and wish the new consultant who took up a post in adult psychiatry in Carlow on Monday the best of luck.

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