Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 7 July 2022
5. Deputy Richard O'Donoghue asked the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science if he would consider the setting up of a three-year academic degree (details supplied), with a fourth year to be completed in practice, in order to alleviate the lengthy waiting lists for children. [36968/22]
View answerMy question asks that in view of the many skills and positions shortages within the health sector, would it be possible to look at a three-year academic degree, with a fourth year to be completed in practice? This would alleviate the lengthy waiting lists for children in respect of speech therapy, child psychology, orthodontics and many other areas.
That is an interesting question from the Deputy. We have been trying to do everything we can possibly do in order to try to reduce waiting times and increase the number of professional places.
A key focus of Funding the Future, our funding plan for higher education, is to ensure that we have an appropriate pipeline of suitably qualified individuals to enable the provision of essential public services in areas such as health and social services, as referred to by the Deputy. This priority is now being advanced by my Department in conjunction with HEIs. It is very important to say that these institutions are autonomous in the context of academic affairs, including the design and structure of the programmes they offer. I wish to reassure the House that, quite rightly, I do not decide academic programmes, their structure or design. This is a very important safeguard of quality, which the Deputy will appreciate. The programmes put in place and delivered by HEIs must also conform to regulatory standards required for professional accreditation. For example, CORU, the multi-profession health regulator, is one of the regulatory bodies and the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland is another, to ensure that their programmes meet relevant standards. Clinical placements are arranged by individual institutions, the HSE and other healthcare providers.
What I can and am doing, to assure the Deputy, is working with other Departments to identify the skills needs. To give one example, we started this with medicine this year where we sat down with the Department of Health. We asked it how many doctors it needs to train. It has given us a number, we will be publishing it very shortly, it will be a multi-annual figure, and we have announced 60 more places from September in medicine. We announced about three extra last year, to give the Deputy an idea of the scale of this increase.
I now want to do the same exercise with the Minister of State with responsibility for disability, and with the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth on speech and language and occupational therapy professionals. I would love to say that I can slash a year off the course, but I cannot. What I can do, however, is ensure that we can very significantly increase the places, and that we train a great deal more people in these areas. I will be happy to engage with the Deputy further on this matter.
While I realise that the Minister has opened up new places in research through the Innovate for Ireland programme, there has to be further openings within the postgraduate programmes. For instance, psychiatric nurses have worked for many years in different speciality areas. They could provide therapeutic roles and alleviate huge backlogs in the child and adolescent services areas which currently have waiting lists of 3,914 children. The nursing and teaching areas have merged their work placement programmes very successfully. This has helped with their staff shortages and with the training of extra staff. It has also helped with waiting lists relating to very vulnerable people.
Instinctively, I am very sympathetic to the point the Deputy made to the effect that there is real urgency here for all of us - regulatory bodies, universities and clinical placement providers - to try to be innovative, to completely protect and safeguard quality and professional standards regulation 100% and to see what roles those involved can play in increasing the supply. This is not about numbers, as the Deputy said, but it is about a child waiting to see a speech and language therapist or an occupational therapist or about a person waiting for an appointment with a psychiatrist or a psychologist. These are very pertinent issues.
I do not want to mislead the Deputy because I am not trying to be unhelpful but I do not have a role in saying that an institution must reduce the length of the course from four years to three. I would suggest that the conversation the Deputy has had with me could usefully be had with other line Ministers and with their regulatory bodies. What I absolutely do have a role in - I will not shirk my responsibility in this regard - is in doing something that we have not done properly in this State before, namely, workforce planning. How many speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, doctors and nurses do we need and how are we going to increase the pipeline to deliver those professionals? That is the way in which I may be able to help the Deputy.
In order for a three-year degree course to happen, the colleges and universities will need more supervised placements in all allied health areas, such as language therapy, nursing, midwifery and psychology. Qualified people will be needed to supervise the placements. Surely this is a real possibility in the context of the many critical skills shortages within the various areas of health. The ultimate significant benefit would accrue to the children on waiting lists. Those lists are growing longer every day. Has the Minister looked at the CAO system in the context of the skills shortages in health? Has he examined opening up further placements in universities and colleges in order to meet the demand in the health sector?
Now we are talking about something I can definitely help with. "Yes" is the short answer. This year we announced 1,056 additional places in college from September. We did not do what we had done in previous years, which was to announce a large global number. We have tried to target them in areas where there is a critical skills need, particularly a public service skills need. There are more nursing places this year, well over 100, and more medicine places. The single biggest increase ever, and certainly in a very long time, is that there are more therapy places, though not as many as I would like.
The next thing is to definitely do this workforce planning exercise in order that when we increase the size of higher education overall next year, we will look to target the areas where there are skills needs. The Deputy has identified a number of these.
There is another important area in respect of which we can provide help, namely, further education and training. If one looks at speech and language therapy, which is a very important discipline and profession, there is also a role for the speech and language therapy assistant, for which we can provide through further education and training. The more we can expand the system in general for some children and for some adults, the better. Speech and language therapy assistants will be able to play a very helpful role in that regard. They would certainly be able to support speech and language therapists. That is definitely an area I would be eager to explore, because there is action we can take quite quickly in respect of it.
