Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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5. To ask the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth to provide an update on children’s disability network teams in Mayo, including staff vacancies, recruitment and waiting lists for assessment and therapy; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [43583/24]

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Too many children are waiting for therapies and assessment in County Mayo. I am trying to get a grasp on the staff vacancies in the children's disability network teams, CDNTs, and the waiting lists for assessment and therapy in County Mayo.

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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I thank Deputy Conway-Walsh for raising this question. I acknowledge the challenges faced by children and young people in terms of accessing services, particularly essential therapy services, in Mayo. The lead agencies there are experiencing ongoing challenges in recruiting across a range of disciplines and grades to fully staff the CDNTs. Recruitment is ongoing for administrative and therapy staff in CDNTs via the HSE recruitment process. Since March 2024, there has been a net increase of seven whole-time equivalents, recruited from national and local campaigns into the existing panels of the CDNTs in Mayo. A number of posts are approved but have not yet been filled or have been at least accepted but the new person has not yet started.

Under the progressing disabilities model, CDNTs offer interdisciplinary support. They do not maintain waiting lists for individual assessments or therapies. Wait times for the CDNTs are not recorded per discipline but, rather, as per national key metrics since children's disability services reconfigured. As of September this year, 14 children across the Mayo CDNTs are waiting zero to three months for an initial CDNT contact.

There are many important HSE initiatives to address staffing and these will have benefits in Mayo, as well as in my own constituency and throughout the country. International recruitment is looking to draw people back, particularly graduates from Ireland who have gone abroad to the UK, the USA or Australia. There are relocation supports to support that. There is quite a generous package of relocation supports to make it more attractive for people to move back here and start working on the CDNTs. We have also enhanced the ability of the section 38 organisations and particularly the section 39 organisations to recruit. They can now recruit through the HSE website. There is also work under way to capture graduates early. The HSE engages directly with health and social care professionals graduating from Irish universities them to encourage them to join CDNTs or CAMHS teams around the country.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the Minister. The reality is that there are still too many vacancies. I take what the Minister is saying in terms of trying to attract staff. However, continually having vacant posts puts pressure on the workers who are there already. Last week, I was at a wonderful initiative with Mayo Autism Camp and Manulla FC. There were many parents and children there. Although the day was really wonderful, I could not help thinking of all those children who were there on the day and were waiting for vital therapies and assessments. We are failing children with disabilities in Mayo and that cannot continue.

The Minister referred to section 38 workers. The promises to them have not been kept. There has been a reneging on the negotiations that were to be done with the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC. There are many things that can be fixed but until all of the positions are filled within the CDNTs, we are not going to be giving the necessary support to these children.

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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I fully agree with the Deputy on the challenges of recruitment. It is the big challenge in disabilities services right now. The core solution to that is to train more health and social care professionals, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, physiotherapists and psychiatrists. We need more of them because the level of demand and need has increased, both because of enhanced levels of autism among children and young people and also because older people with a disability are living longer, and that is good, but it means their needs are greater and we need more therapists there. That is why the longer-term piece that I and the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, have undertaken with the Taoiseach and the Minister, Deputy O'Donovan, to open up more CAO places for these courses is really important. This year, universities all over Ireland will significantly increase places in occupational therapy and speech and language therapy. We are doing some work with Belfast as well. It will take a number of years for those students to be trained. That is why the interim measures I set out in terms of that international recruitment to get people into positions now is really important.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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That is part of the problem. Fine Gael has been in Government for the past 13 or 14 years and now we are looking to address these situations. The workforce planning should have been in place well before now. It is not a big surprise that there is such a high number of children with disabilities in need of support. I would say that this Government has failed children with disabilities and their families in County Mayo.

We will not even address scoliosis and the 15-year-old child I have coming in to who, because his operation was delayed, is now being turned away and cannot even get a second opinion. Saying he is not fit to travel is all very well but he cannot even get a second opinion that could be done online or by handing the file over to somebody in England or America. I know this is not the Minister’s portfolio - it comes under health - but I ask him to be compassionate in cases where families are just turned away and told they have been failed and they cannot have the scoliosis operation. I apologise but I could not leave without mentioning this case that I am trying to deal with. This 15-year-old child deserves more.

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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I thank Deputy Conway-Walsh for her passionate advocacy on behalf of that child and his family.

What I have done as Minister is to recognise that for so long disability was the poor relation within the Department of Health. We have taken it out of the Department of Health and brought it into my Department. That applied from March 2023, more than 18 months ago. There is so much more that I and the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, would have loved to do, if we had the time to do it. However, in those 18 months we have recruited a person in the HSE to look just at workforce planning for the disability sector. For the first time, there is a clear focus on what the disability sector needs. For the first time, there are two Ministers actively engaging with the HSE board and the HSE chief executive and saying “Bernard, we know cancer care is important and the issue of trolleys in emergency departments is important but we need you to focus on disability every single day.” We are seeing changes. We got the optional protocol ratified and we got the new national disability strategy which is to be published in the next number of weeks. Changes are happening but I absolutely recognise there is a long way to go to support children and families on our CDNTs. I acknowledge that.