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

I thank the Senator for the opportunity to discuss this in the House. As Minister of State with responsibility for disability, and as I have said in this House a number of times, I am committed to delivering real and tangible solutions to enhance the capacity of our children’s disability services, and to provide better supports to children and young people with additional needs, as well as to their families. One of the solutions put forward was to develop an AON assessment hub. As the Senator is aware, during a Labour motion last May I committed to having six planned regional assessment teams in place by 1 August to tackle AON waiting lists. If not, I said I would consider covering costs incurred by parents - no pressure. Following discussions with the HSE at both national and local CHO levels, I confirm to the House today that the hubs were in place at the start of August undertaking AON caseloads. These hubs and their effectiveness will be examined in the context of feedback received from clinical staff, the implementation of the progressing disability services, PDS, roadmap and the development of the regional health authorities in early 2024. In terms of CHO 9, the HSE advises that overall 2,829 children were awaiting an AON as of June 2023. It is important to note that a more recent figure is not available due to ongoing industrial action. An AON administrative hub has been established in the Swords area of CHO 9 to maximise efficiency and deliver a CHO-wide approach to AONs. The current configuration of the CHO consists of an AON hub manager, four whole-time equivalent assessment officers of which one post is vacant, three whole-time liaison officers and four whole-time equivalent administrative support staff. All are in place bar the one. The following specialists are allocated to the CHO 9 hub. There is one whole-time equivalent clinical psychologist, one 0.8 whole-time equivalent clinical OT and a specialist speech and language therapist. That is currently vacant due to maternity leave.

In terms of work being done around all of the assessment hubs, each CHO has developed an approach to establish a hub based on the unique circumstances that apply in the CHO. It also reflects the capacity they have within their existing resources. I assure the Senator that while the challenges across children’s disability services are considerable, we will continue to work with colleagues in the HSE and in my own Department to pursue all reasonable avenues to reduce the AON backlogs. It is important to acknowledge that, when I made that statement in the Dáil, hubs were not in place. It is important to acknowledge that the HSE has worked at speed, both Bernard Gloster and Bernard O'Regan, to put these in place. There are names, locations and staff attached to them.

The next part is that at the moment the configuration is being made up from within the teams themselves. That is not private. Those are publicly funded and staffed teams. I have not seen the tender documents that have come in to add additional capacity. I have started from within our own resources, and what we can do with them. I spoke about private services in the Dáil last May, and I still talk about the tender document that went out and has come back in, and which is being assessed to add additional capacity. I committed to 60 hubs. In fact I have delivered on eight. The ninth one, in CHO 2, has its own configuration of how it has always worked, and it has the lowest AON numbers in the country. What it is doing is working, so why change? They are content, so I am not going to force that by any means. We will take the learnings from either side.

I will say one final thing. In health you do not need a diagnosis to access services, but in education and social protection you do. There is our problem and that is our challenge.