Anne Rabbitte (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the Seanad and wish her all the best in the role. In the two minutes allocated to me, I am going to focus on two important issues relating to accident and emergency departments, training and this environment. We need to ensure that when a parent brings a child, a teenager, young adult or an older adult who is neurodiverse or has intellectual disabilities that there is a space there for a sick person to be seen. They need to feel safe and have their rights protected. I welcome the Minister's comment about listening to the mother, the aunt, the sister and the sibling. The sibling knows best, and the mum knows best. Some of our children who are neurodiverse or have intellectual disabilities need to be put in an environment where they are not actually over stimulated, where they get over-anxious, where the lights are too bright, the noise is too much and there are too many strange faces. Could we look at our emergency departments to ensure that there are nurses trained in intellectual disabilities and with autism training as part and parcel of the core team? I thank the Minister for that.

The next issue I want to focus on relates to diagnostic overshadowing again in the context of emergency departments. My ask on International Women's Day is that we listen to mothers, sisters and aunties in order that the staff in the emergency department listen to a child who is nonverbal. They must not assume that because a child is nonverbal or has a condition such as Down’s syndrome or other intellectual disability that he or she does not have a pain. As was mentioned earlier, everyone needs to have their markers checked, temperatures, bloods and have their scans taken. Mum might not want it but please do it because not taking those markers costs lives. Staff should not assume. Staff need training in this to work with people with intellectual disabilities and with children who are neurodiverse. On International Women's Day some mums are grieving for the loss of their child due to diagnostic overshadowing. My speech today was dedicated to a five-year-old whose name is, it is important to say, Kate Molly Colum, who suffered from diagnostic overshadowing. She had Down's syndrome.