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

I thank the Deputy for raising this important matter and for giving me the opportunity to speak on it. She is right that I take this issue very seriously. A script has been circulated but I am not going to stick to it. I would like to tell the Deputy the case she has raised is unique. I would like to say that parent is the only parent in the country who is experiencing this. I would hate that parent to think I have sat on my hands for the past 12 months. I have repeatedly asked the HSE to improve its communication. To spend the time to write a letter to that parent to tell her to stop contacting the HSE is unforgivable. There is no excuse for that. That woman, like any other parent, is seeking services for her child so she can give him the best start in life. That is what early intervention is about. Time and again, communication has failed us, whether in how we communicate with parents, how we communicated the reconfiguration of progressing disability services for children and young people, PDS, or how we told parents what PDS teams they were part of. We have failed again and again.

That is why I secured funding in the most recent budget to ensure we would have administrative staff on all those teams. If we had dedicated people to answer the phone and ensure communications went out, parents would not get to the level of frustration where they have to continuously contact their public representatives to make representations so their child may get seen to or even find out where they are on the list. The plan was that there would be two posts, a grade 3 and a grade 5, on each of those teams, so the telephone would be answered and proper communications made.

My office has worked tirelessly with national head office within the HSE to support it in terms of what good communications might look like and what parents are seeking, that is, information on when the team will be reconfigured and how the process will involve the parents.

It is regrettable that the parents' forum part of PDS has been established in only five of the 91 teams. Through this forum, parents can come together and get a clear understanding. When I was in Cork recently, one parent said that, if parents knew what the plan was and understood it, they would work with the HSE but that there had been no communication whatsoever. This is no way to treat parents. Communication is the essence of what PDS should be about from the start, not telling parents where their children's cases are in April, moving them in June only to then leave them not knowing what is happening.

Without proper early intervention and diagnosis, services cannot be accessed. The HSE talks about delivering needs-based services, and we know from recent months that, if people want to access social welfare and education services, they must have their diagnoses. Early intervention is key.

The Deputy asked about CHO 5, what position it was in compared with other CHOs and so on. No different from any other CHO, the Deputy's CHO is under immense pressure relating to the recruitment of staff. To support teams on the ground, I wrote to the Tánaiste in recent weeks asking for occupational therapists, physiotherapists and speech and language therapists to be included on the critical skills list. Doing this would be important. I have also met Mr. Paul Reid and the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, in recent weeks. We want to put together a roadmap - we will have it in the next four weeks - for bolstering our PDS teams. While I am committed to the PDS, we must consider more agile ways of supporting families in getting interventions. This would involve returning therapists to special schools.

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