Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)

The Government recognises the importance of early intervention for children with disabilities and ensuring they receive the right services at the right time. Under the programme for Government, we are committed to ensuring children and their families who need early intervention and therapy input can access it in a timely way.

The key vehicle for change and improvement is the roadmap for service improvement for disability services for children and young people. The implementation of this roadmap is well under way and will continue until 2026. The roadmap contains an important set of actions that, collectively, will enhance children’s disability services in Ireland. They include significant measures to integrate and improve access to services, expand the workforce and advance better communication and engagement with families. A key part of this work has been the improvement of access to services through the children’s disability network teams, CDNTs. They are providing supports and services to more than 43,000 children.

I fully acknowledge that there is still a lot more to do. Recruitment and retention of health and social care professionals is the most significant challenge and work is ongoing to increase staffing levels. The HSE has advised that the most recent CDNT workforce survey available was conducted in April. This survey demonstrates an overall national increase of an additional 8% in staffing in CDNTs, compared with the workforce at the review in October 2024. This brings the total number of whole-time equivalents to 2,009. The Department is working with the HSE to introduce specific recruitment and retention incentives for therapists to work in CDNTs, including a sponsorship initiative and facilitating direct access for funded agencies to existing professional panels.

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