Lucena Clinic Services currently have full time and part-time Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychiatrists across our services in Dublin and Wicklow. This includes a Clinical Director who works on our management team and the HSE area management team to highlight the needs of the young people attending us and how we can meet them as a service.

Each Consultant leads a team of specialists made up of several different disciplines. Child & Adolescent Psychiatrists are medically qualified doctors who have specialised in working in the assessment, diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and in diagnosing neurodevelopmental differences like autism and ADHD. Child Psychiatrists can diagnose specific mental illnesses and advise on treatment options for children.  They have training in pharmacology and are able to prescribe medication for children when appropriate. They usually also have training in psychological therapies, research, service development, and audit. All consultants in our service are on the Medical Council specialist register for child and adolescent psychiatry, which is distinct from the general psychiatry register.

As with all our hospital outpatient and inpatient services in Ireland, other doctors who work in our clinics include Senior Registrars who are specialising in child & adolescent psychiatry and will shortly become consultants themselves, as well as Registrars who are specialising in psychiatry. All these doctors are medically qualified, have completed intern year training and have at least between 2 and 6 years of specialist training in psychiatry. Many will have worked in other areas of medicine, such as paediatrics, general medicine or GP before pursuing this career.

If you have questions or are just wondering about any of the medications you are taking, have been prescribed, or are discussing starting a trial with your psychiatrist you can find out more information about them on the YouthMed.info website which offers a source of reliable information on the most commonly used mental health medicines for young people.