A number of children with mild mental health or developmental difficulties have waited up to 11 years for a first assessment for services, including psychological assessment and occupational therapy.
New figures from the Health Service Executive showing the waiting time for assessments at the organisation’s primary services disclose that one child in the HSE’s Dublin South City and West region waited 11 years for a psychology assessment. Another child in Louth-Meath spent more than nine years awaiting an occupational therapy assessment.
The data, from October 2025, reveals there was also a child waiting 6½ years for a physiotherapy assessment in Laois-Offaly, another waiting six years for a speech and language therapy assessment in Dublin North West, one waiting five years for an audiology test in Roscommon and another waiting six years for a dietetics assessment in Laois-Offaly.
The information relating to primary care services was released on foot of parliamentary questions submitted by Social Democrats TD Liam Quaide over the past year.
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Primary care services provide a range of clinical supports for young people with mental health or developmental difficulties that are generally classed as mild to moderate.
Early intervention at primary care level is seen as important in preventing a mental health or developmental difficulty from becoming more entrenched and more problematic. The services can include psychology, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, dietetics and audiology.
Mr Quaide, a TD for Cork East, said the figures show cases of children facing extraordinarily long waiting times were not outliers. Instead, he said, long waiting times were evident across the State and across disciplines.
“These figures on longest waits for child and adolescent primary care services show an entrenched national crisis across disciplines. The HSE’s continued enforcement of recruitment restrictions through its pay and numbers strategy is absurd in this context,” he said.
“These services cannot rebuild without proper workforce planning and comprehensive recruitment,” he said.
The issue is due to be discussed later this month at a session hosted by two Oireachtas committees: the health committee and disability matters committee.
Mr Quaide said he became frustrated with getting responses in which all children waiting for over a year were put in a “+52 week” category.
“I had to repeatedly submit follow-up PQs [parliamentary questions] to determine if that meant 53 weeks in some cases or +500 weeks in others,” he said.
“I sought those longest waits because I knew anecdotally that children were routinely waiting four to five years across disciplines in primary care services.”
Almost 27,000 children have been waiting for more than a year for occupational therapy appointments, while almost 28,500 children are waiting for more than a year for psychology assessments.
“There are considerable amounts of children among those cohorts waiting several years, or four to five years certainly, for psychology assessments,” he said.
Mr Quaide said that a wait of 11 years for one individual child might be an outlier, but added it was “completely unacceptable” for that child to have to wait for that length of time.
The HSE was contacted for comment on the waiting lists.
In a response to a parliamentary question about shortfalls in staffing in December, Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill said the emphasis was no longer on staffing thresholds.
She said the focus was now on providing a single point of access to services, greater access in the evenings and weekends, and a drive to implement the action plan to reduce primary care therapy waiting lists.
