Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish to thank Senator Wall for raising these important issues today and for sharing the heartfelt pleas of Aileen and Nicola for support.

Both the Government and the HSE recognise the challenges in meeting the demand for children's disability services and are acutely conscious of how this impacts on children and their families in these most difficult and challenging times. Nationally, children's disability services are undergoing significant change as the HSE progresses towards the reconfiguration of services into children's disability network teams under the national programme, Progressing Disability Services for Children and Young People, for those aged up to 18 years. The key mission for this programme is to provide a clear pathway and fairer access to services for each child with a disability and his or her family based on his or her need and not on his or her diagnosis or where he or she lives or goes to school.

South Kildare, in conjunction with the rest of County Kildare and west Wicklow, was reconfigured under this programme in 2014. Consideration is now being given to realigning the Kildare-west Wicklow children's disability network teams with the community healthcare networks which were not in place at the time of the reconfiguration in 2014. The remainder of CHO 7, where south Kildare is based, should be reconfigured by the end of June 2021. This reconfiguration will improve access to services and waiting times for intervention.

The vision for children's disability services going forward is to have easy access to the services children require, fairness in providing services and families and health services and schools working together to support children in developing their potential. This will result in consistency and equity in delivering disability services for children and young people.

Significant additional resources have already been redirected to the assessment of need process in CHO 7 to work through the backlog of applications. This project is addressing the backlog to deliver assessments to each child as quickly as possible. There are a number of disciplines working on the backlog, including psychology, speech and language therapy and occupational therapy, enabling assessments to be fully completed as quickly as possible. It is expected that all diagnostic assessments will be completed by the teams by the end of May 2021. The Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, has put a huge amount of time and effort into trying to deal with the waiting list for the assessments of need. Huge progress has been made. It is expected that all diagnostic assessments will have been completed by the teams by the end of May 2021.

Clearing the assessment of need backlog is important because it will ensure that resources can be targeted to provide the appropriate therapeutic interventions children and young people need. Funding for an additional 100 new therapy posts was allocated as part of budget 2021. Some of these posts are allocated to CHO 7 and it is expected that a number of them will be in place by the end of quarter 2. This will also help to strengthen service provision in the region.

I trust that this clarifies the issue raised by the Senator. I know that my colleague has also raised the same issue with the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte. It is an issue about which we are all concerned and we all hear about it in our constituency offices. I hope this has given the Senator some clarity.