Health Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-05
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Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG), Dún Laoghaire

As the Deputy will be aware, primary care psychology provides a broad range of supports and treatment for mild to moderate mental health conditions. HIs concern is particularly the south Lee area, so I might get to that. Currently 2,445 children and young people under the age of 18 are waiting to access primary care psychology in the south Lee area, with 198 waiting for between 26 and 39 weeks, and 1,792 waiting longer than 52 weeks. That is an aberration and should not be the case. It simply has to be improved. Several key initiatives have been deployed by HSE South West to try to improve access to the services. This is having an impact, to be fair. In 2025, 30% more patients were seen in the region compared to 2024. The Deputy and I, however, want that rate of improvement to continue.
Furthermore, the regional director of psychology has established a child psychology service waiting list improvement initiative to drive improvements in accessing key areas such as workforce planning and development for the region, waiting list and capacity solutions and clinical service innovation. Local recruitment, last month and this month, will lead to retaining graduating trainees in permanent posts mapped to primary care and CAMHS and adult mental health services priorities. A number of psychology assistant posts from a new national panel created in December 2025 will be allocated to both the IHA south and west, and north and east to reflect the fact that the longest waiters are in the south Lee and north Lee areas.
We also have the primary care psychology waiting list initiative to try to target. That has had some success since 2021, removing more than 15,000 children from the waiting list nationally. Additionally, we have put in funding of €4.75 million in budget 2026, which will remove a further 3,000 from the national wait list this year, a number of whom will be from the south Lee area. I am not comfortable with the levels of waiting in the area, as I know the Deputy is not, and I expect a continued reduction, as was the case from 2025, which was better than 2024. We do have a lot of work to do.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-05/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:44+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-05