Liam Quaide

And I think that's what needs to shift here, because when you don't invest at all of these levels of support,

you end up actually costing the system more in the long run, as well as the human cost.

Well, the unions at that health committee session that I mentioned kept coming back to the need for multi-annual funding.

And this is the same, I'm also a spokesperson for disability and all of the disability organisations keep telling us that they can only kind of plan in a very sort of a limited way from year to year because they don't have multi-annual funding.

They're only funded year on year.

So it's almost just like barely keeping kind of the show on the road.

And in this case that I'm highlighting, it really isn't on the road at all.

So what we need is those services being allowed to invest in the long term, that we have a very clear staffing benchmarks per population.

One of the brilliant things about a Vision for Change, which is now 20 years old, is that it set out very clear staffing targets per population, per care group.

And when the government introduced a new policy called Sharing the Vision,

about seven years ago, they actually dispensed with those staffing targets because they kept getting held to those standards.

But we need to go back to that and we need comprehensive recruitment.

It is actually quite straightforward.

Well, what you get is a substandard service.

Like when a vision for change was written in 2006, it heralded a new way of providing services

that would be wraparound, that would treat the whole person, not just treat symptoms, that would take account of a person's historical struggles with trauma and intergenerational difficulties, practical supports that they needed.

And what we're getting now is a very narrow, medicalised, very supervision-focused range of services.

And that's at this inpatient level.

When you look at primary care level, you're often not getting any service at all because the waiting lists are just so off the Richter scale.

Well, in the first instance, you go to your GP and your GP will refer you to your adult mental health team or your CAMHS team.