1) Ok time for a new thread looking at the recently released review of mental health services over the time of the programme for government of the last government:

https://www.hse.ie/eng/services/publications/mentalhealth/delivering-specialist-mental-health-report.pdf

2) The context you need to bear in mind is that A Vision for Change made recommendations about resourcing and staffing over 14 years ago so these findings will help you gauge progress over those years.

3) It's also work bearing in mind our average spend on mental health as a percentage of the health budget is currently just 6% compared to 10-12% of most of our european colleagues

4) Funding for specialist mental health team staffing dropped from a high of 31.1 million in 2013 to only 3.9 in 2019, a drop of 87.5% over the course of 6 years

5) Counselling in Primary Care received no funding from 2014-2018 and a news report from May 2020 noted there were 5200 waiting for this service, it doesn't take much analysis to see the problem here

6) The Youth Mental Health Taskforce from 2017 made a lot of excellent recommendations to improve mental health in a 2 year implementation timeframe, with a budget of only 2m is it much of a surprise that not nearly enough of it's recommendations have been realised?

7) Lets take a closer look at CAMHS:
Only 44% of recommended staffing levels of community teams 14 years later
CAMHS Hospital Liaison teams only 3 of the 16 recommended teams in place & only 17.5% of recommended levels of staffing

8) Technically 71/79 recommended CAMHS teams are in place but the size of these teams range from a low of 3.8 clinical staff to 14 at the highest.

How does a team of 3.8 mange demand?

CHO5 (South East) has only 39.8 of recommended levels #postcodelottery

9) Unfortunately this report doesn't break down CAMHS by discipline and compare to recommended AVFC levels. The closest data I can find for that is 2018 showing psychology only at 38% of recommended levels

10) Community Adult Mental Health Teams are faring a lot better with 77.1% of the recommended levels from AVFC

11) Mental Health for Intellectual Disability is where the greatest deficits are. Only 32% of the Adult ID mental health staff available and in CAMHS ID only 14% of recommended levels.

12) Only 26% of new development posts in the last 2 years have been filled, & 500 remain unfilled in last 6 years, maybe just maybe we need to think about how we recruit and make wholesale changes to get people in post because this clearly isn't working.

13) If we don't put sustained pressure on government in terms of mental health funding then there will sadly be another thread like this in 10 years time when Sharing the Vision has run it's course and we will all regret not making our voices heard