Liam Quaide

In many cases, the approved centre is...

for the most part, a place of kind of supervision, risk management, medication, and not a place of kind of more in-depth therapeutic care and recovery.

And the kind of overarching reason for all of this is, you know, in some cases there's been historic underinvestment.

So, for instance, in the Midlands, that's the starkest example.

The approved centres in the Midlands have had no assigned psychologist, occupational therapist or social worker attached to any of their approved centres historically.

In Sligo, they've never had an allocated psychologist in their adult mental health unit.

In Lakeview and NACE, they've never had a social worker.

But crucially also in recent years, we've had the HSE embargo in 2023, 2024.

That has had a huge impact on this.

And then succeeding that, we've had what's known as the pay a number strategy, which has really put a very crude kind of cap on staffing numbers.

So for instance, there's been posts lost in Mayo Acute Adults Unit in Lowes Meats as well in their rehabilitation and recovery team.

They've actually lost posts as a result of these recruitment strategies.

Well, my parliamentary question looked in particular at approved funding for posts.

So this is not about...

where primarily it's not about where the HSE is attempting to recruit people in.

It's where they haven't actually approved funding.

So you'd often hear a kind of a line from government or from the HSE that they've got great difficulties recruiting people and attracting clinicians into care groups.

That's drastically exaggerated as a reason.

The main issue here is that we have a government ideology that tends to see

recruitment of essential staff almost more like a nuisance cost than as an investment in our society.