David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Minister's comments about all the staff in CAMHS who do a wonderful job. However, let no Minister or politician hide behind staff in an attempt to avoid or dodge political responsibility for failures in the system. There are obvious capacity failures which have been identified for many years. This is not something that we learned about from this interim report. This echoes and reinforces what we already knew that capacity was not there. There have been governance issues in the system for many years and there was a failure to deliver. We cannot dodge political responsibility for all those failures.

In his opening statement, the Minister said that about 4,000 open cases will need to be reviewed. These are children who were prescribed medication and where a review or monitoring has not happened within six months. The obvious question is why was that not done beforehand. We now have a report telling us that this needs to be done but where is the capacity within the system for that to be done? Both Ministers said it will start shortly. How long will it take? Has the system the ability to do it? Has it the staff to do it? That question needs to be answered by both Ministers present. Why did it get to a point where we now need to review 4,000 cases? Why were those cases not dealt with before now? That is a clear failure. Somebody needs to take responsibility for that failure and it seems that nobody is.

The big challenge in healthcare across all settings is with workforce planning. The Minister talked about south Kerry CAMHS where we cannot recruit a consultant. There are many of examples in CAMHS where we cannot recruit staff to deliver the services that we need because we do not have a credible, comprehensive workforce planning strategy.

The Minister talked about youth mental health services. I think we need to develop a new child and youth mental health service that includes people from 18 to 25 years of age because far too many children once they reached the age of 18, reach a cliff edge and do not get the services they need. For many of them adult services are not appropriate and we need a serious realignment of that policy. Both Ministers will need to accept their fair share of the blame and responsibility for the clear failures identified in this report.

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