Mr. Pat Healy:

Regarding the services for the elderly, a number of questions were raised. I confirm for members that the nursing home support scheme will provide 22,000 places this year. There will be over €939 million continuing in that resource. At the same time, we have used €23 million from that fund to develop new options in 2014. Many of them will address the issues that Deputy Fitzpatrick talked about. For instance, €10 million will be used to develop intensive home care packages. That will be targeted at people with dementia in addition to others whose only option at present is to enter long-stay care. We will be targeting cases of the kind exemplified by those who are currently in hospital for a long time and we will be trying to ensure they get better options, not just long-stay care. We will also be developing new opportunities on short-stay provision, transitional care, rehabilitation and such initiatives. We will be trying to combine this with home care packages in a more integrated way that has not been achieved in the past. Thus, our first step will be to ensure that the public providers, in addition to the private and home care providers, start working in a more collaborative way. Yesterday, we met Nursing Home Ireland. Over the next year, we will be having more productive engagement with it and the home care providers to ensure that we combine in delivering more integrated services. Some 56,000 people have been receiving annually home help and home care packages. This level of provision is being maintained in 2014. It represents a significant resource of over €315 million.

As the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, stated, there are developments amounting to €14 million benefiting the disability service plan this year. Some €10 million of this is targeted at initiatives to meet the needs of approximately 1,200 young people who are either leaving school or exiting rehabilitation training places. As the Minister of State said, our intention is to put in place this year a much more focused programme. This is already under way to ensure that all families, including the children and young people involved, will be advised of the places they will receive by June of this year. Thus, the challenging issues that arose over the summer months in the past year and preceding years will not arise. Out of the resource, we will address a number of emergency places that arise during the course of the year. We will be working with the service providers in that regard.

The other key initiative, which I referred to earlier, is the €4 million that will be used to roll out a more comprehensive, integrated programme for those aged between zero and 18. The detail of this will be included in the divisional plan that will be published later in the month. The intention is to build on very good work done already in some of the local health offices with local implementation groups and to expand across the 25 local groups to ensure all of them are progressing in an integrated way in rolling out the model of care for this year. That covers the services.