Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy again for highlighting this issue. She speaks of the parents she has met in her constituency. I am in a neighbouring constituency and have also met parents who are equally frustrated and angry and understandably so. The key way to address this is to get more staff. We need to retain the staff we have and recruit more. That is why we have been working very closely with the HSE on the roadmap which will set out concrete measures that can deliver more therapists, in both the short and longer term. The longer term is about getting more college places opened up but we all know it will take a few years for that to deliver. The short term measures include recruitment, looking at different grades and supporting the retraining of people. We are agreeing all of that with the HSE and it will be set out in the roadmap, which we hope to publish in the next number of weeks.

Since Mr. Bernard Gloster took over as CEO of the HSE he has met with the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, to discuss this specific issue. We have asked him to prioritise the whole area of disability within the HSE. The reason disability was taken out of the Department of Health and brought into our Department was to ensure an overall prioritisation of disability and within that, we have very clearly identified that children's disability services are the number one priority.

Finally, there is another issue that is addressed in the roadmap. What the Deputy spoke of in terms of that meeting in the Bracken Court Hotel, where parents were relating their experiences and where the very focus of the meeting got caught up in parents' experiences and their very justifiable anger, indicates that there is a gap that has developed between parents, the HSE and other service providers because parents have been disappointed and we have to work on that. That is another issue in the roadmap because we need better communication as well as better and more accurate engagement by the HSE and service providers with parents.

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