Fórsa trade union warns that even filling all current vacancies would not address the crisis in children’s disability services due to inadequate baseline funding and planning.
“We still have 450 vacancies across teams across the country, but even if they were all to be filled tomorrow with a magic wave of the wand, we still would not have enough staff to meet the needs of children and young people,” she said.. “And that is a problem the Government is failing to grapple with in any meaningful way.” Speaking to the Irish Examiner during the Fórsa annual conference in Killarney on Friday,
Ms Kelly called for planning to match staff numbers with defined waiting time targets.. “I think there is an unwillingness to put a number on it because they would rather people think, ‘this is an intractable problem’ that they can’t possibly solve,” she said.. If there were targets, “then we should work from that principled position, and know how many staff do you need to have in order to make that a reality,” said Ms
Kelly.. ‘Postcode lottery’ She also raised concerns that children’s access to services depends on staffing levels within their local team.. “There’s still a postcode lottery,” she said.. “So to use the HSE terminology at the moment there are some teams which are ‘relatively well-staffed’ or ‘relatively better staffed’ and then teams that are ‘not well staffed’.. “If every team was staffed to the number they are funded for, it is still not enough to meet
the population.. So we have to grapple with that.”
childrens disability services, Fórsa, staffing crisis, HSE, healthcare policy, disability support, service demand