Lynch out to put focus on

KATHLEEN Lynch said the focus is now on recruiting more speech and language therapists and occupational therapists to provide services to people with disabilities.

The Minister for Primary Care said funding will be allocated to expand the availability of Speech and Language Therapy at primary care level.

It will also support the reorganisation and expansion of speech and language and other therapies, including the development of early intervention services to facilitate children with a disability in mainstream preschool settings.

She said a recruitment process to provide supports to children was going and said around 1,400 mental health staff would be needed.

She told a post-Budget briefing: ‘In mental health we’ve always known how much staff... about 1,400 was the point at which we needed to recruit.

‘People come and go and people go away to have particular experiences.

‘Sometimes they come back. We’ve been successful in the last year in recruiting. Those posts are not all nurses.’

She added: ‘But when it comes to the type of therapies that we intend to have more freely available now, then we will be concentrating on trying to recruit speech and language therapies occupational therapies and that particular group.

‘As well as that, this year we will have 180 nurses graduated that have a particular interest in disability and we are hoping to hold on to as many of them as possible because they are quite a small group but a very specialist group,’

‘We need those people with that very specialist knowledge

‘Recruitment will be ongoing’

to stay within the system, not necessarily in approved centres but within the community, so that type of recruitment will have to be ongoing.’

In the area of mental health, the Government is also committed to the development of a modern, patient-centred and recovery-orientated mental

health service. She added: ‘For next year we are already having the programme written up in terms of what we will do with that money and pushing mental health services out in the community.

‘We got additional money for speech and language therapy and other therapies, that early intervention piece, especially for children with disabilities at the pre-school space.’

Since coming into office t he Government has i ncreased f unding by € 125million for mental health and suicide prevention and there will be a further increase in funding in line with the commitment in the Programme for Government.