Details of the numbers waiting for services provided by the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service have been released in a report by the Chief Mental Health Inspector Dr Susan Finnerty.
There are 302 people on the wait list in Community Health Organisation(CHO) 3 which includes South Tipperary along with Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford and Wexford.
CHO 5 serves North Tipperary, Clare and Limerick – a total of 355 young people are waiting for services in this area. The total number of children and young people on wait lists for Mental Health services is 4,361 at present. Parents are forced in some cases to try to find suitable but expensive private care.
Dr Susan Finnerty’s final report on the provision of CAMHS found huge differences between the wait times and experiences of children suffering from mental illness, depending on where they were in the country – an earlier report informed parents that children in Ireland do not “have access to a safe, effective and evidence-based mental health service”.
Across the nine Community Health Organisations covering the country the numbers waiting varied from 288 in Galway/Roscommon/Mayo to 976 in Kerry/Cork.
The HSE says “every effort” is made to prioritise urgent referrals, so that young people with high-risk presentations “are responded to as soon as possible and this is often within 24 to 48 hours”. The spokesperson says that as of “June, 94.1pc of all urgent cases were responded to within 72 hours.”
