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

I will answer those two straight questions. On family forums, the answer is "Absolutely". In addition, I plan to go back to having my ministerial meetings with each of the CHOs. That is happening.

On workforce planning, the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O’Gorman, is away this week. It will be one of our key objectives in the Department to develop a workforce plan in respect of disabilities. It is also important that we focus on retention. You can see from the staff census that we are getting people in but we are not retaining them. The turnover is far too high in our disability network teams. We need to retain them. We are doing exit interviews but it is exactly as the Deputy is saying: because we have too few staff on some of the teams, people realise that it is a far bigger challenge than they had envisaged. We are doing that, but we need to bolster the teams, not only with occupational therapists, physiotherapists and speech and language therapists but also with assistants. Furthermore, we need to look at the position relating to the social care model, social care workers, social care assistants and social workers, and link with family workers. We also need to have behavioural therapists and music therapists. We need the full gamut. It is not a case that one size fits all.

I am at one with the Deputy when it comes to dieticians. When you train only 29 dieticians in a year, there is no wonder we have a shortage. The children who apply for the dietician role in the CAO will need 615 and then they will go into a lottery. That is the number of spaces we have. We need far more places on dietetics. It needs to be completely expanded. We need to have a complete suite of measures on this. It is not only dietitians but we need nutritionists and an understanding of food therapy. I agree with the Deputy and 29 is too few. We need multiples of that.

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