Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael)

I thank Senator Collins for raising this important issue and for offering me the opportunity to respond.

Summer services, such as summer camps, fall under the bracket of what we term "alternative respite". We often forget that respite can take many forms, such as overnights in a respite facility or another person’s home, additional support during the regular day such as afterschool or holiday programmes, or in-home support. As Minister for State with responsibility for disability, I know the importance of providing respite for people with disabilities and their families. For a disabled person, respite can be an opportunity to take part in afterschool or weekend activities with their peers, while for some carers the focus is on getting some much-needed help and relief in caring for a loved one.

I take this opportunity to stress that provision of respite is a key priority area, both for me and the HSE, and the benefits of proper respite supports cannot be overstated. Respite services can play a crucial role in delaying or preventing moves into full-time residential placements and can be a very important factor in preventing carer burnout and family breakdowns. There has been significant focus on respite provision in recent years, and additional funding to expand respite services has been provided in successive budgets. Between 2021 and 2024, €35.7 million in new development funding was provided to respite. This has resulted in the provision of tens of thousands of new respite sessions. Summer camps, along with afterschool respite services, Saturday clubs and other community-based respite support activities, are recorded as day-only respite. From 2021 to 2024, day-only sessions increased nearly 400%, from 16,306 to 65,151.

In the national service plan for 2025, additional funding has been provided to increase the occupancy of existing respite capacity, where feasible, and alternative respite provision, including in-home respite support hours and group-based targeted measures such as summer camps and evening provision.

Ensuring that the disability sector is fully resourced is a key priority for the Government, which has been reflected in the programme for Government. While additional funding has been provided over successive budgets, it should be noted that the HSE is operating in a very competitive global market for healthcare talent, as the Senator is aware. There are significant shortages of qualified healthcare professionals across the globe. The HSE and the various lead agencies are experiencing ongoing challenges recruiting and retaining staff across a range of disciplines and grades. A dedicated disability workforce strategy will be developed by the HSE in 2025, to meet growing service demands and address recruitment and retention challenges across specialist disability services. To address the high staff vacancy rate during 2025 across all children disability services, the HSE is continuing to carry out sustained workforce recruitment and retention initiatives which include intensive recruitment efforts across the HSE, section 38 and section 39 organisations to onboard staff into vacant jobs. It has also broadened access to the HSE CareerHub portal, and has had active and sustained engagement with the employment market and students to improve the perception of and interest in working in children’s disability network teams, CDNTs, boosted by an increase in clinical placements in CDNTs and the development of pipeline initiatives to map relevant applicant pools directly into CDNT jobs.

To address resourcing challenges, the HSE resourcing strategy, Resourcing our Future, was launched in May 2023 to ensure a sufficient domestic supply of healthcare staff. That strategy is being implemented to maximise the resourcing and delivery of publicly funded health services for the future. We are doing recruitment drives internationally as well, to try to attract more staff into the services as well as into higher education, meaning putting them through our universities.