Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party)
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538. To ask the Minister for Health his plans to ensure CAMHS is adequately resourced to deal with the increased strain on the mental health of young persons during the Covid-19 pandemic; and the extent to which he is liaising with the Department of Education and Skills in view of the exceptional pressure on leaving certificate students [7420/20]

Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael)
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The development of all aspects of mental health services for young people, as reflected in the HSE Service Plan 2020, remains a priority for Government. Services have benefited from significant additional investment over recent years, which has resulted in an overall provision of €1.026 billion for HSE Mental Health this year. This represents an increase of €315m since 2012, and an increase of €39m over 2019. The additional €39m includes €13m for the continued rollout of new developments this year.

There are currently 71 Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) teams, 4 CAMHS inpatient units and 3 Paediatric Liaison Teams. Approximately 18,000 children were expected to be referred to the HSE CAMHS service this year, with around 11,000 expected to be seen by CAMHS professionals. In each region, individual cases professionally assessed as requiring urgent access to CAMHS received priority.

The HSE Service Plan 2020 aims to improve all aspects of mental health care, including the development of CAMHS inpatient and community-based services and their integration with Primary Care and increased access to talk therapies for young people. A new forensic CAMHS unit, the first of its kind nationally, has been built at the new National Forensic Mental Health complex at Portrane. This will provide specialist CAMHS care not previously available within our system.

The Department of Health has worked with the HSE to develop various e-Mental Health responses for CAMHS and other youth services. Approval was recently announced for the new CAMHS Connectservice for the HSE West region, which will pave the way for a national roll-out of such a new system. The need for such an approach, and how we plan and deliver our mental health services overall in the future, has been highlighted by Covid-19 and has been prioritised by Government responses to date.

The Department of Health and the HSE, in collaboration with key cross-Government and cross-sectoral partners, has developed a new mental wellbeing campaign. This campaign, hosted on gov.ie/together, offers support and resources to help deal with stress, anxiety and isolation currently experienced by many people, including young people.

The Department of Health and the HSE will continue to work closely with the Department of Education to advise on enhanced mental health supports for young people. Detailed information in relation to the Leaving Certificate is available at .

This site contains information on wellbeing supports for Leaving Certificate students. It includes a series of supports on managing wellbeing, coping with uncertainty, managing stress and anxiety, and has been developed by the National Educational Psychological Service. The webpage has links to more individualised support for students to access, should these be needed. The Department of Health has worked with the Department of Education and Skills and the HSE to ensure the most appropriate services and resources are clearly signposted for students.

The Government is satisfied that CAMHS and other youth mental health services are adequately resourced at this time but we will continue to keep the issues raised by the Deputy under close review.