Health Services Waiting Lists Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-30 ============================================================ Emer Higgins (FG), Dublin Mid-West I also welcome Deputy Keira Keogh and her visitors, Ciara and Grace. I welcome Samanta Augulytė. I welcome and congratulate the new Deputy Lord Mayor of Dublin city and wish her a very successful year ahead. I thank Senator McCarthy for raising this important issue. In many ways, what he has articulated here today is the need for different Departments to work collaboratively. He spoke about special education, health services, therapies and assessments of need through the Department of disability. I agree it is important that we break down silos and ensure that disability is a priority for every Department. I am taking today's Commencement matter on behalf of the Minister for Health, Deputy Jennifer Carroll MacNeill. I thank the Senator for raising this and for giving me, as the Minister of State with responsibility for disability, the opportunity to respond. Too often, children and families can face duplication across waiting lists, whether that is through delays in access to therapy or delays while awaiting assessment. Our aim must be to ensure that these assessments support timely access to care, rather than becoming a barrier to it. The Government is committed to improving access to health services for children and families, and to ensuring that care is delivered as early as possible, as close to home as possible, in line with the principles and goals of Sláintecare. In May 2026, just last month, the HSE launched its autism assessment and intervention pathways protocol, which aligns with the new single point of access model. In short, it is a streamlined referral pathway for children and youth mental health services, designed to help ensure that children and young people are directed to the right support at the right time through a single co-ordinated entry point. This is to be used and adopted right across the health services, whether it is through the CDNT team, primary care or CAMHS. It represents a milestone in improving services for children and families as it provides a more direct and clearer path for children and their families to autism assessment through existing services. Taken together, the protocol, the single point of access approach and the introduction of the community care record will help create a more joined-up and consistent experience for children and families accessing our health services, while improving clarity, co-ordination and speed of access to assessment and supports. To support the implementation of the autism protocol and improve service integration, new in-reach teams are being established, with 11 to be established this year and nine further teams next year. Those 20 teams will operate in each of the 20 regions. Recruitment to these in-reach teams will commence in quarter 3 of this year. The teams will be tasked with building capacity within existing services, supporting integration and improving the flow of client care. They will work collaboratively with primary care, disability and mental health teams to undertake those assessments and interventions, as appropriate. They will also be used to help address the issue of children waiting for autism assessments across the multiple waiting lists. We often get complaints from parents that children might be on a waiting list in primary care, CAMHS or a CDNT, but when they get to the top of the waiting list, somebody says they are on the wrong waiting list, and they go back to the start. This is aimed at stopping that from happening, ensuring there is no wrong door and that every point of access to the health service is co-ordinated. In particular for those seeking an assessment for autism, it will ensure they are looked at in this way. It will be very beneficial. I was at the launch. It is very exciting, and we really expect it to reap rewards. Challenges remain, however. Waiting lists and access times are too long, in particular, timely access to services, such as CDNT and primary care therapies, which remain a challenge across the country. To address this, the Department of Health and the Department of disability are currently working with the HSE on a focused programmatic approach to therapy waiting lists. This aims to put in place considerable standardised infrastructure to support systematic responses to waiting lists across the country. I am conscious of time but I will come back in again. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-06-30/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-30