Albert Dolan (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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898. To ask the Minister for Health the measures the Government is taking to address the unacceptable delays in accessing public psychological and speech and language therapy services for children; if a scheme will be introduced to reimburse families who are forced to pay for the provision of assessments and therapies due to the public system’s inability to meet demand; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [37938/25]

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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Improving timely access to healthcare for all by reducing and reforming waiting lists, including primary care waiting lists, is a key focus of the Path to Universal Healthcare: Slaintecare and Programme for Government 2025+ and I fully acknowledge that there is an urgent need to reduce waiting times and waiting lists for primary care services such as psychology and speech and language therapy and to improve consistency of patient experience regardless of location.

I recognise the central role that primary care therapy services play in offering the opportunity for early and cost-effective interventions for children and young people. In Budget 2025, the Government continued its investment in initiatives aimed at addressing long waiters for children and young people in Orthodontics, Audiology and Child Psychology. The impact of this investment is evident as the Primary Care Psychology Waiting List initiative has successfully removed over 10,000 clients from the waitlist since its commencement in late 2021.

In line with the Programme for Government commitments to build capacity in primary care therapy services, a programmatic approach to address primary care waiting lists has been developed jointly by the Department of Health, and the HSE.

This programmatic approach involves three main workstreams: Workstream 1 aims to deliver improved analysis of primary care therapy activity and productivity to maximise capacity within existing resources.

Acknowledging that there is a need for shorter-term measures to address the current scale of waiting lists, Workstream 2 focuses on the development of measures, at a national level, to address patients waiting more than a year to access primary care therapy services. At present, proposals are being examined to address the national waiting lists for physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech and language therapy.

The focus of Workstream 3 is developing a Primary Care Therapy Waiting List Management Protocol to ensure that a consistent and transparent approach to referral, waiting list management and discharge of patients is applied across the primary care therapies in all Community Healthcare Networks (CHNs) thus improving overall patient experience. Workstream 3 is being supported through the joint Health Research Board/Department of Health ‘Evidence for Policy’ programme.

Taken together, it is expected that the actions under this programmatic approach will, put in place considerable standardised infrastructure to support systematic responses to primary care waiting lists and will, very importantly, lead to reduced waiting lists and more timely access to primary care therapy services.