Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)

On behalf of the Minister for Health, I thank Deputy Hearne for raising this issue. It gives the Minister the opportunity to update the Dáil on this important issue. What the Deputy has set out is not acceptable.

Primary care services, including primary care psychology, play a central role in providing care and treatment to both children and adults in the community. Per the implementation of the national policy on access for children and young people with a disability or developmental delay, children and young people with complex disabilities are seen within the children’s disability network teams, whereas those with less complex needs are seen within the primary care services. The HSE has advised that increases in the numbers of referrals and an increase in the complexity of presentations requiring more intensive interventions have resulted in increased pressure on primary care services, including primary care psychology.

As the Deputy outlined, primary care services are facing staff shortages and ongoing recruitment challenges for health and social care professionals working in general and specialist services in the community. These factors have all contributed to an increase in waiting lists for services across the country, including Dublin North-West.

This Government recognises, however, the central role that primary care therapy services play in offering the opportunity for early and cost-effective interventions for children and young people.

In budget 2025, the Government continued its investment in initiatives aimed at addressing long waiting times for children and young people, including in child psychology. This year, funding of €4.75 million to continue this initiative will target the removal from the waiting list of 2,933 people under the age of 18 who have been waiting longer than 52 weeks to access the service, with almost 900 people already removed at the end of the first quarter of this year. The Minister for Health fully acknowledges there is an urgent need to reduce waiting times and waiting lists for primary care services and to improve consistency of patient experience regardless of location.

In line with the programme for Government commitment to build capacity in primary care therapy services, a programmatic approach to address primary care waiting lists has been developed jointly by the Department of Health and the HSE. The aim of this programmatic approach is to put in place considerable standardised infrastructure to support systematic responses to primary care waiting lists and to facilitate a greater understanding of the scale of demand, which we all know about and the Deputy has outlined, as well as the drivers of demand and to allow for more timely access, improved planning, interventions, investment considerations, enhanced productivity and the most efficient use of capacity.

This approach involves three main workstreams which aim to improve access to primary care therapy services by analysing activity and maximizing capacity, developing national measures to reduce long waiting times, and creating a consistent management protocol for referrals and waiting lists to these services.

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