More than 9,000 children with disabilities wait over a year for first contact
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More than 9,000 children with disabilities have been waiting longer than 12 months for their first contact with a Children’s Disability Network Team (CDNT), new HSE figures show.
This week GAA correspondent John Fogarty told how his daughter, 6, has waited almost four years without interventions from their local CDNT despite being assessed as needing urgent help.
Now, these figures show the startling extent of the national problem. Some 13,403 children are waiting for a first contact at one of the 93 CDNTs. Two-thirds of these children (9,008) were waiting over a year by the end of July.
In Cork and Kerry, 281 have waited over a year so far. There is a total of 698 on the waiting list. In the mid-west, including Limerick, Clare and north Tipperary, of the 1,318 on the list, 532 have waited more than a year.
In the southeast, including Waterford and south Tipperary, 1,304 have waited over a year out of a waitlist of 1,662. Dublin north city has the highest number of people waiting at 2,880. Almost all of these (2,479) have waited more than a year.
The data was released by Bernard O’Regan, HSE Assistant National Director of the National Disability Team, to Labour TD Sean Sherlock.
The HSE director said CDNTs give services to “over 46,000 children" and "strategies and supports for urgent cases on the waitlist where staffing resources allow.” He added: “However, there are significant challenges for CDNTs” which he linked in part to “significant staffing vacancies”.
Between January and July, some 6,156 new children were referred, an average of 879 every month. He also mentioned a “growth in demand" for assessments of need (AoN), diverting further resources away from interventions”.
The HSE is legally required to carry out AoN but parents have also gone public about long delays in carrying these out.
Peter Horgan, Labour councillor and a member of the HSE Regional Health Forum South, said: “Families are expected to simply put up with a lack of services."
“The matter of staffing must be grasped by Government, election or not, and staff in the CDNT ecosystem placed on the same wage and conditions as their counterparts in primary care,” he said.
“That would go some way to reducing the twin track paediatric disability system operating currently but we need Government to recognise their role in ensuring the pay scales are equalised.”