Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North-Central, Fianna Fail)

The situation is unacceptable. Like the Minister, I spent 15 years in a classroom and delivered hours as a special education teacher from time to time. In that 15 years, I have seen things improve in terms of resources and overall funding but in what is being experienced on the ground, particularly in the area of assessments of need, things are definitely regressing. We need to put that on the record from the outset. That is generally agreed by all parties here.

I fully understand the frustration of parents. Not a week goes by in our clinics when we are not dealing with parents where there is some difficulty in accessing therapies, assessments of need or some type of service, be it from the HSE or a charitable provider. That said, it also needs to be acknowledged that we are facing an unprecedented level of demand. I will not repeat the statistics the Minister outlined, but there is a clear surge in the number of assessments of need applications that are coming through every year. We need to be grown up about the conversation that needs to be had. As a State, what we have done over the past while clearly has not worked. We now need to look to the future to see what we can do and what we can change to ensure children get the diagnosis they need and deserve and, following on from that, that we can deliver the therapies they deserve.

There is something I have never understood in my six years in national politics. How is it I can attend a service such as the Rainbow Club in Cork, which can advertise for a physiotherapist, an SNA or a speech and language therapist, and get genuine competition for the job it is advertising, but that is not the case for the HSE? I am not sure of the latest figure in my region of Cork but the HSE is in the fiftieth or sixtieth percentile as regards vacancies for roles. I can never marry in my own head why a service such as the Rainbow Club, which is a very well-run charity run by Karen and Jon O'Mahony, can succeed but the HSE consistently struggles to hire these staff. I will spend a minute talking about the Rainbow Club as an alternative to the way we do things. I happen to have been a director of the Rainbow Club for the past 12 months, where I have seen that more than 1,300 children can avail of a service every week. They do not require a diagnosis. If a child presents with a need of any description, or if a parent or schoolteacher has concerns, they can refer that child to the Rainbow Club in Mahon. There is no compulsion to have a diagnosis. We need to look at a model where a diagnosis is not required and not the clinical model we seem to have been focused on for far too long. The priority now needs to be on delivering therapies.

As I said, 1,300 children - statistics are done every week and the number is growing - can be catered for in an environment that they are very comfortable with. Some of those children have left school places but thrive when they come to the Rainbow Club. In the coming months, we hope that a new home can be built for the Rainbow Club under the HSE capital plan. That is something all Deputies in Cork who have involvement with the charity will be pushing for, when that moment arrives. Thankfully, it has secured its site. We need to look at the Rainbow Club as the model for how to deliver therapies because the HSE clearly cannot provide that for us.

I will make one last point on the assessments to be provided. The Minister mentioned an additional €10 million in funding will be provided under the current budget. I implore her to look at children who were previously assessed by a private therapist, which was paid for by the State. I ask for that to be done as an interim arrangement. I am not saying that is the optimum situation to be in but it needs to be done urgently, if it can be done again. I will add only more thing to that. I came across two families in my area that have had that publicly funded, private assessment and diagnosis of their child. They had to then go back to the CDNT or SENO, who stated that because it was a private diagnosis, it is not recognised, even though it was a publicly-funded assessment. That situation is not an isolated one. I have come across it on a few occasions. That needs to be clarified. There is no point in us publicly funding assessments in the private sector only for them not to be recognised subsequently.

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