Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to have been appointed to this position. Mental health and, more importantly, promoting positive mental health, are close to my heart, as they are to the hearts of many in this House. It is also an area where there is so much more we can do to help each other, work with each other and try to remove the stigma still attached to mental health. I refer not just to politicians but to society as a whole. The stigma is still there, and while we have made great progress during the past decade, we still have a long way to go.There has been much discussion recently on the funding of mental health, some of which has been constructive but some of which has not. I will outline a number of the facts. The national service plan mental health budget for 2016 is €826 million. Since 2012, the plan's budget has increased by €115 million. This year, there will be an increase of €41 million, or 5.2%, on the outturn last year. The number of child and adolescent community mental health teams and acute inpatient beds have increased substantially while waiting lists for child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, have decreased, and initiatives are under way to reduce them further. We have to understand that there is a great deal of work to do in these areas as well.

In broad terms, we have facilitated the move away from institutional care to community care, providing service users with more accessible treatment in better environments. We have closed many of the older psychiatric hospital inpatient units, providing new, improved facilities such as The Phoenix Care Centre, the new acute unit in Cork University Hospital and those due to open shortly in Galway and Drogheda. Preliminary site work has also commenced on the new state-of-the-art national forensic hospital to replace the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum. We have helped to foster a greater awareness of mental health promotion in society through campaigns such as Little Things, while the suicide prevention strategy, Connecting For Life, has helped to increase awareness of suicide in society. While much good work has taken place in recent years, I am under no illusion that more work and further effort is required. We need, for example, to continue development of counselling services across both primary and secondary care. We need more community mental health teams, together with improved 24-7 response and liaison services. Most important, we need to ensure no group, regardless of age, ethnicity, sexuality or circumstances, is left behind or overlooked. Changes initiated as a result of new funding allocated by the previous Government have paved the way for real and lasting change for service users and we need to build on that.

The national mental health strategy, A Vision for Change, is ten years old this year. Within the next 100 days, I will initiate an evidence-based expert review of progress in the implementation of this policy and in the improvement of mental health services. The review will take account of international best practice in the area of mental health and will inform how we will develop our policy.

Perhaps the main challenge to the mental health service is the recruitment and retention of staff. Many well-trained, highly motivated people are taking up employment outside the public service, either in the private sector or abroad. I touched on this yesterday with a number of Senators. I am conscious of the difficulty in recruiting and retaining nurses in the mental health area. For that reason, I am happy to inform Senators that the HSE is reintroducing a one-year post-registration programme in psychiatric nursing for nurses who are registered in either the general, intellectual disability or children's divisions of the register maintained by the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland. A total of 30 places have been made available on the programme which is due to commence in autumn 2016 in association with UCD. While this is a positive move, there is a great deal of work to do, and further recruitment of staff within the HSE requires change, for which I intend to push.

We live in an evolving world. While we can communicate with people more quickly, in many ways, perhaps, we are becoming more isolated due to the pace of our daily lives and the pressures we are under. Our pace of life is getting faster. This puts people under pressure and in need of assistance. The need to reform and to update our mental health policy and services is clear. We need to plan for this but also address changes happening now. Education is key and is most important at an early stage. Mental health issues often manifest at a much younger age than we like to think about or even discuss, but that is today’s reality. The pressures that young people face today compared with when any of us was in school are completely different. Every second of a young person’s life is online, and while it is visible for everybody to see, it is also visible for everybody to criticise - what they look like, how they dress, who their friends are, who they hang out with, where they go to school and how they do in exams. There is a different dimension to young people’s lives that was not there a few years ago and we need to start dealing with it.

In the next 100 days, I will establish a youth mental health task force. I am actively working on this. The task force will consider how best to assist young people in developing resilience and coping skills to support their emotional well-being at an early stage, and to build awareness of how to access high-quality effective services when they need them. The task force will comprise a number of non-political, non-governmental members with significant expertise in the area of youth mental health and will be supported by a significant cross-departmental effort to establish a new, co-ordinated way of working across government to advance youth mental health and well-being. This will be a critical aspect of our work. The mental wellness and well-being of young people is not simply a health issue and it should not relate specifically to the Department of Health. It is not simply an education issue either. It is an economic, social and community issue that requires the public, private and voluntary sectors and all of us to co-ordinate and pull together in order that our efforts combined achieve more than the sum of their parts and in order that every young person has the full support of the community they live in to reach their full potential.

I refer again to the marriage equality referendum last year. This was not mental health legislation but it had a massively positive impact on the mental health of many people. We need to identify the everyday issues that affect young people’s well-being and, as a community and as a society, and we need to equip them with the tools to deal with them effectively.

I thank the House for the opportunity to contribute and I am here to listen to what Members have to say. I will take on board what they say and, I hope, work them with them into the future.