Prof. Orla Hardiman

Good morning.

First of all, I have to apologise for what happened there on behalf of myself and my colleagues.

I mean, that's...

That's unconscionable what happened.

It would have been true during COVID as well.

We must remember that.

Of course, yeah.

2021 was during COVID.

So a lot of services were just working on skeleton staff at the time we weren't, you know, the sort of extent of engagement would have been less, but it's still unconscionable what happened.

I mean, that should never happen.

Functional logic disorder is a very complicated condition that requires multidisciplinary care and a proper care pathway.

And unfortunately, as Mags was saying, we don't really have a good care pathway for that particular condition.

It requires a wide range of expertise.

It's not a simple condition to manage.

You need a group of specialists to manage this condition.

So the system is under enormous strain.

I mean, partly it's a function of the success of neurology and neurological conditions.

When I started, and I'm pretty old, there were only 11 neurologists in the country.

So we had one neurologist per 300,000.

So we have improved substantially, but the difficulty is if you have a relatively rare set of conditions, relatively common set of conditions, and you increase the number of specialists, you actually increase the demand because the understanding is there that there's a service available, at least some kind of service that should be available.