Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator O'Loughlin for giving me the opportunity to address this specific matter. I want to go back to the question she submitted, which was on redeployment to address assessments of need. We are speaking about speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and physical therapists. This is the question the Senator laid before me to address today. My answer does not comprehensively address this but I would like to address it and bring the Senator up to speed on it.

The reason €7.8 million was provided from Sláintecare funding was to address the backlog in assessments of needs for in excess of 6,500 children. This is why, in conjunction with the Department and the HSE, I put in place a plan to address it and get everybody on the one page where the assessments of needs are done and, at the same time, put in place a plan for the delivery of services through our clinicians at the other end.

The deployment piece is what the Senator has raised this morning. It is something that is becoming a more alarming concern to me because it is not just in the Senator's community healthcare organisation area but throughout the country. I spoke to Paul Reid and Anne O'Connor on 5 October and I raised it as a huge concern for me. Only this week, I spoke to Fergal Goodman in the Department and other principal officers to portray my fears and anxieties about the families and the children such as Ava throughout the country.I can say that while I have an investment, parents are not feeling that they are getting the calls, we cannot support them and are not in a position to deliver. Not only is the HSE sending the kinds of letters to which the Senator referred but I am also aware that other providers under sections 38 and 39 that have been commissioned to do the work are also now part of the redeployment. It is important for us to understand the need for contact tracing, the value of which was demonstrated by the report that one person who did not restrict his movement led to the infection of 56 others.

The are two things here, the first of which is the early intervention piece which applies to children from nought to six years of age. If we do not get it then, we lose that piece because the child goes onto another list when he or she turns six and there is another backlog there. This is a priority within my Department, hence the €7.8 million allocated in August. I can only say that the HSE and the Department of Health are working closely with me. Contact tracers have been recruited through the HSE. That is going on and they are being trained in as we speak. The whole purpose is to let the staff, the trained clinicians, come back. It is not happening quickly enough if parents are receiving those letters. It is causing extra anxiety.

I received good news this week to the effect that, as part of essential services, speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and physiotherapy will continue during level 5 restrictions. They will not cease. Those services did not continue during the previous lockdown but they will this time. We should not find ourselves with mounting lists. We should find ourselves addressing those issues through level 5. I welcome that and thank the HSE and the Department for getting us to that position.

The National Public Health Emergency Team, NPHET, will meet later today and I look forward to the outcomes of that as they apply to clinicians, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and physiotherapists. I hope that network disability teams will be repopulated to support young people with assessments of need. The Senator can tell Ava's mum that is what has happened through my Department this week. I say that to any other mothers in similar situations who are listening. I am on top of it and across it and will stay that way until I know that everybody who was redeployed returns to fulfil the functions of their jobs.