A new report putting a spotlight on the community services available nationwide for people with neurological conditions was launched yesterday by Minister for Disability Anne Rabbitte.
The Neuro-Mapping Project Report describes the range of community services across the country that people with neurological conditions can access from voluntary organisations, and identifies a number of joint service initiatives between voluntary organisations and the HSE.
It also shows that there are over 60 community-based voluntary organisations supporting those people, providing a wide variety of services in response to their needs.
The report highlights that the vast majority of the 800,000 people living with neurological conditions across Ireland, live within the community.
The report was a joint partnership between the Health Service Executive (HSE), the Disability Federation of Ireland (DFI) and the Neurological Alliance of Ireland (NAI), funded by the Strengthening Disability Fund.
The three key outputs from the Neuro-Mapping project are:
- The development of a unique service mapping template which identifies services across Ireland, categorising them together with agreed and standardised service descriptors.
- Baseline Mapping of all services across each Community Healthcare Organisation (CHO), showing the range and scale of neuro-rehabilitation supports provided in the community by voluntary organisations.
- Documented good practice examples of joint service initiatives between voluntary sector providers and statutory services provided by the HSE.
The Project Partners (DFI, HSE and NAI) have agreed to progress several key actions in the next phase of the project to address the report’s findings.
The service mapping template will need to be developed to encompass statutory service provision and establish a common language for all neurological community service provision. It will also be important to assimilate the language used in the mapping template into future service frameworks.
Engagement with both statutory and voluntary providers is required to understand how neurorehabilitation services are delivered on the ground in communities and how voluntary organisations work with each other and HSE services. This will help to provide insight into the variations in the services, and patient pathways across CHOs, as well as the impact of community neurorehabilitation teams where these are in place.
It is also intended to examine the current journey through these services, through the experiences of people with neurological conditions and their families, and this will demonstrate ways to improve signposting to existing supports.
The report is available to read in full here
