Mark Ward (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Regional Group for giving me the opportunity to discuss this important motion on pre-hospital care. The Minister of State will not be surprised that I will focus on children's mental health in the limited time available to me. We all know that early intervention is key. When children get the care they need when and where they need it, they are less likely to need moderate and acute mental health care as they go on. They are less likely to arrive at emergency departments. I received a response to a parliamentary question which indicated that between January and November last year, after arriving to emergency departments in three hospitals, Crumlin, Tallaght and Temple Street, 741 children were admitted to hospital. This means 741 children were under that much duress. Nothing else was available and so they arrived at our emergency departments with their parents, looking for help. That is not counting how many other children arrived at emergency departments who did not have to be admitted to hospital. Those children would also have received follow-up treatment. That is not good enough. We need to move away from that model.

When I talk about early intervention, I refer to the earliest intervention possible. I will talk about early intervention in psychosis, which is about spotting and treating mental health disorders at the earliest possible stage so that we can put measures in place to avoid children needing to access acute and moderate mental health care or attend an emergency department. The responses to our parliamentary questions so far indicate that no funding has been allocated to the early intervention in psychosis national clinical programme for 2023 because the national service plan has not yet been finalised. We are three months into this year. The Government is not showing any sense of urgency whatever in tackling this issue.

We also need to develop a model for counselling in primary care. We have counselling in primary care for adults but no counselling in primary care for children. The basic, simple talk therapy that children need is not available. Sinn Féin in government would deliver that. I could talk about lists left, right and centre, for example, the 11,000 children who are waiting for primary care psychology, of whom 4,000 have been waiting for a year, and the 4,000 who are waiting for an appointment with CAMHS, of whom 400 have been waiting for a year. I could go on all day about these lists. It is just not good enough. Behind every one of these statistics I mention is a child with hopes, dreams and ambitions who is being denied the opportunity to reach his or her full potential. We must put measures in place to sort that out.

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