Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein)
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640. To ask the Minister for Health if his attention has been drawn to the difficulty many parents are having in accessing child and adolescent mental health services for their children even when in severe and urgent circumstances; and his plans to ensure services are in place to avoid further use of adult services for children. [12182/17]

Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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Improving access to Child and Adolescent Mental Health services, including maximising placements in age-appropriate acute units, are priorities for improvement under the HSE Service Plan 2017.

Additional resources over recent years mean that we now have 67 CAMHS teams, and 3 Paediatric Liason Teams, supported by 66 operational CAMHS beds across the country. A lack of funding for the mental health care programme is not a difficulty at present for the HSE, but there are acknowledged staff recruitment and retention difficulties across the health care system, including CAMHS, that the Executive is addressing. A new Standard Operating Procedures introduced in June 2015 has provided greater clarity and consistency on how this specialist mental health service for children should be delivered nationally. Despite increasing demands overall on CAMHS, irrespective of the source of referrals, individual cases professionally assessed as requiring urgent access to services receive priority.

The HSE Service Plan 2017 provides for further development of the CAMHS service, including better out-of-hours liaison and seven-day response cover, against a background where the population of children is expected to increase by around 8,500 over 2016-17. Around 18,500 children will attend the HSE CAMHS service this year, including around 14,000 referrals. Detailed activity data on access to CAMHS, and also on age-appropriate admissions to care units, is published by the Executive in its monthly Performance Reports available on the HSE website. This shows, for example, 68% of children referred are seen within twelve weeks.

In regard to admission of child and adolescent cases to adult units, there has been significant progress on age appropriate admissions since 2008 when there were 247 such admissions to adult units in that year. This declined to 68 admissions in 2016, despite increasing demands overall. The number of admissions does not necessarily equate to the actual number of children involved, as an individual child may be admitted on more than one occasion in any given year. Performance generally continues to be above the HSE Service Plan target figure of 95%, and indications also are that where a child has been admitted to an adult acute in-patient unit, the length of stay has been kept to a minimum. There has to be some operational flexibility surrounding emergency placements in Adult Units, particularly where very short-term placements occur, and where full account is taken of all relevant factors such as the preferences of all those involved, or geographical factors relating to access or visiting. The HSE closely monitors on a weekly basis all child admissions to adult units, with a view to minimising these.

Work is underway by the HSE to review existing levels of service provision generally, and to examine international models of best practice on the most appropriate models of delivery for use in the Irish context in order to enhance access to mental health care, including CAMHS. My objective, and that of the HSE, is to further improve all aspects of mental health care nationally for those under age 18, including those relating to access and age-appropriate care settings.