Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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The Programme for Government – 'Our Shared Future’ - includes a commitment to advancing neuro-rehabilitation services in the community.

The Health Service Executive is leading on the implementation framework in respect of the recommendations of the National Policy and Strategy for the provision of Neuro-Rehabilitation Services in Ireland 2011-2015.

The Neuro-Rehabilitation Strategy Implementation Framework (IF) was launched in February 2019. The aim of the Strategy is the development of neuro-rehabilitation services to improve patient outcomes by providing safe, high quality, person-centred neuro-rehabilitation at the lowest appropriate level of complexity.

This must be integrated across the care pathway and provided as close to home as possible or in specialist centres where necessary. These services are to be configured into population based managed clinical rehabilitation networks (MCRNs).

The overarching aim is the development of these networks around the country.

In order to test the feasibility of this new MCRN model in the Irish context, a decision was made by the Neuro-Rehab Steering Group to run two demonstrator projects within CHO6 and CHO7 to assess the feasibility of the model to inform national roll-out. 

The recruitment process within CHO6 and CHO7 is well advanced and teams are planned to be operational in Q4 2023. 

Moving forward with the strategy, the plan will be to roll out these services on a national basis.