Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Funchion is right about therapists. Budget 2021 included a commitment to recruit an additional 100 therapists. That number will include speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and physiotherapists. I want to have fully staffed children network disability teams, of which there will be 91 throughout the country. However, there is no point in having leads if we do not have the therapists in place to make the interventions.

Another aspect of this relates to the figures. A total of 382 children are waiting for an assessment of needs. I can elaborate on assessments of needs following my conversation earlier with Ms Dwyer in CHO 5. They will be completed by the end of April at the latest. The intervention will follow for those 382 children and the other families who are waiting. The intervention will follow straight away for families who have received letters indicating they will not be seen until August 2021. They will have been on the list for two years. Some 100 therapists were doing contact tracing and swabbing. Some of the 100 therapists to whom we referred never went into their field of being proper clinicians. They are now being returned to the network disability teams. In Carlow-Kilkenny they are all back in their posts. The recruitment of a further 100 therapists will result in a dramatic improvement. That should be of some comfort to the parents as these therapists start to come on-stream. We are seeing the pathways and flows starting. It will take us some time to see the outcome after we have completed the assessments of needs but I am confident from talking to Ms Dwyer that this is a priority for her. I will speak with the CHO, which is fully responsible for this, to ensure this is a priority in CHO 5, not only within the disability area but also in primary care.

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