Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour)

The clinician will be a national lead, which is important. The difficulty with diabetes is that the service has been patchy around the country. The service in Dublin has always been the best and people travel from as far as Cork. There was a huge difficulty with childhood diabetes in Cork over the past number of years. It has improved but further improvements remain to be made. Rather than a standardised performance across the country, the performance is patchy. A clinical lead brings standardisation into play. Putting the working group in place is a huge step forward. This is a problem that will double in the coming years and we must consider management of this chronic disease. The consequences of not managing it properly may be horrendous. It is often forgotten in this debate that having a specialist nurse at the end of the phone line, who can reassure parents in the early stages and explain how to manage the child's condition, would prevent many children from ending up in hospital. I hope the working group will look seriously at this.