Sir, – I am a doctor, a child psychiatrist and the parent of a child with additional needs.
Nothing could have prepared me for the challenges in trying to access services for our son.
We have waited months for appointments, spent hours telling our concerns over and over again to professionals only to leave appointments with poorly photocopied handouts for home interventions. While these may have a place, they are no substitute for tailored specific and evidence-based intervention.
We have applied, and held our breath, for a place in a special school, a school with a clinical team on site that will understand, appreciate and acknowledge our son’s concerns only to learn that the clinical team is to be redeployed shortly under the Progressing Disability Initiative.
It seems we are the “lucky” ones: our son has a school place, we can fund private therapy and one of us can stand back from full-time employment to provide support at home.
For those without appropriate school places, without any educational, clinical and therapeutic supports, whose children are not reaching their potential and whose families are suffering as a result, the legal route may be the only road ahead.
Whistleblower Shane Corr shines a light on the shadows that lurk on this route, the dark forces prepared to sacrifice therapeutic trust, confidentiality and patient privilege so that government departments avoid challenge and accountability.
Those in the clinical and administrative realms who allowed this to happen must be brought to account. – Yours, etc,
Dr MARIA DUNNE,
Dublin 4
Sir, – It should be remembered that the context of the RTÉ Investigates programme into the manner in which the State treated families of children with autism was that these families were forced to take the Department of Health to court to vindicate their children’s rights. Before any abuse of power or inappropriate breaches of confidentiality took place, the starting point for these families was that they could not have these rights met by the State without taking legal action.
This is not normal. It is not normal for a State organ supposedly tasked with providing a service to children to repeatedly act in its own interests rather than in the interests of the people. It is not normal for a State body to respond to gaps in service provision in disability not by resourcing that service, but by cynically reducing assessments for children to a meaningless box-ticking exercise, as it has done with the recent changes to the Assessment of Needs process.
It is not normal for children to wait between two to five years for intervention from disability teams, as is common in north Dublin, due to a lack of resources. It is not normal for children with hearing loss to lose access to their in-school therapists as collateral damage in the restructuring of disability services nationally.
It is not normal that expert therapists are redeployed to Covid swabbing, costing children their expertise. It is not normal that specialist rehabilitation services are not available to children in most parts of the country.
There should certainly be consequences for the appalling failures highlighted in the report; until this happens, the whole system is tarnished and trust is lost. But it must be remembered that even before this scandal our system was failing to meet the needs of many children with disabilities and more significant reform is required beyond this matter. – Yours, etc,
Dr IRWIN GILL,
Dublin 4.
Sir, – The recent RTÉ programme that revealed the Department of Health was compiling dossiers on children with autism whose families have had to take legal actions is extremely concerning. The question arises as to the extent of knowledge of this practice among senior members within the department. Three Ministers in the Government, including the Taoiseach and Tánaiste, are former ministers for health and all three should make clear the extent (if any) of their knowledge of this practice.
The Ombudsman for Children has rightly raised concerns as to whether this practice is also being applied to other families who have taken legal cases. Given many of these children will be wards of court, the president of the High Court should demand an immediate explanation from both HSE and Department of Health management as to the extent of this practice. Families are entitled to know that their right to privacy is being respected.
The Medical Council also needs to take a robust approach and seek a list of any of its members who provided private medical information without consent from patients.
The current recruitment process for a new secretary general for the department offers an opportunity to reform an entity which has a history of failure in regard to the provision of services to children with special needs. The focus should be on recruiting an external candidate from outside the Civil Service. – Yours, etc,
RUARY MARTIN,
Sandyford, Dublin 18.