Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I considered the Deputy's question at length and I was trying to understand exactly what he was asking. If I do not cover the specifics he wishes me to cover, I will happily revert to him with a note or talk to him about the issue separately.

Section 38 and section 39 organisations have service provision arrangements with the HSE across a range of services, including healthcare, social care, mental health and disability services. The arrangements cross over voluntary acute hospitals, under section 38 funding; disabilities, where a significant proportion of the funding goes to both section 38 and section 39 organisations; and some other section 39 organisations which provide services for older persons, mental health, palliative care and so forth.

With regard to the disabilities sector, the disability capacity review to 2032 has identified the importance of multi-annual funding, to the Deputy's point, to support forward planning of the services, which can be difficult and frustrating for many of these organisations. The review has drawn on the best available evidence and information to estimate the scale of the current outstanding need for HSE-funded disability services and how we can shape this and invest in it over the next ten years.

Work is under way to prepare an action plan for disability services for 2022 to 2025, in line with the commitment in the programme for Government to work towards implementing the disability capacity review and building out all of those services. In practice, however, the full roll-out of multi-annual budgeting across Government is constrained. That is not only the case for section 38 and section 39 agencies because funding is constrained for hospitals and waiting lists. We launched the waiting list action plan for this year. I would have loved to have been able to launch a multi-annual plan but there are legal constraints around multi-annual funding. It is something we are looking at for current expenditure. We can provide multi-annual funding for capital expenditure. To the Deputy's point, section 38 and section 39 organisations would be in a much better place if we were able to make the kind of multi-year commitments we would like to be able to make.

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