Liam Quaide

Good morning, Clare.

That's right.

There's 67 around the country and they are made up of 98 child and adolescent placement beds and there's over 2,200 adult beds.

And I think it's important to say at the outset that this isn't an isolated issue of understaffing.

I've been looking into a range of services from children's primary care, adult primary care,

CAMHS, older adult mental health services and what we're seeing across the whole system is chronic understaffing, treadbare support and we recently had a session in the in the Oireachtas Health Committee on staff morale and the message that unions kept coming back with was that services are being asked to carry rising needs with often unsafe staffing levels or staffing levels that just can't provide the level of holistic multidisciplinary care that they're meant to

And that is leading to a huge impact on patients, but also on staff morale.

And in terms of this cohort, so an approved centre is a registered inpatient mental health service.

They include acute psychiatric units for people who are in crisis, but also continuing care services.

So for people with chronic

severe and enduring mental illness who require support over the long term.

Absolutely.

So some of them are residential services and some are ward based settings, so acute psychiatric wards.

And what we're seeing then is that there's an absence of key roles of social work, occupational therapy and psychology.

What that means for patients is, for instance, you know, a lack of trauma informed care in the case of psychology, a lack of therapeutic work.

For social work, you know, there's an absence of support with supporting the whole family.

Sometimes safeguarding concerns can't be investigated or domestic violence concerns.

And with occupational therapy, that's key to helping a person with a serious mental health setback in their life or chronic mental health issue to rebuild routine, confidence,

practical kind of daily functioning skills.

That's exactly it.