Catherine Byrne (Dublin South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will not be long. I thank the witnesses for coming in this morning. I thoroughly agree with Deputy Regina Doherty that it is about money. While it is also about management, it is certainly about money if one wants to implement something. When the HSE is counting trolleys, does it also count chairs? Are they part of the overall picture? If somebody is sitting on a chair in a corridor, is the chair counted as well?

I am glad to see that 65 beds will be opened in Mount Carmel and that there will be new short-stay residential beds. I fought hard to get beds for local people in respect of the Hollybrook unit in Inchicore. Hollybrook has been a step-down unit for St James's Hospital because of the transition for the new national children's hospital. They were supposed to be 50 extra beds that were short-term but we still have not moved anybody over there and it is not possible to get anybody into it.

It is very difficult to get someone into a home care package. I have had significant problems locally even getting a local district nurse to take a call, which they refuse to do. They will not even correspond with you. When you finally get in touch with them through the person for whom you are trying to get the home care package, the person concerned is told they should not have contacted their public representative and that they should have gone to the nurse. However, this can take a couple of weeks and things do not always work out as easily as that.

Families need to step up to the mark. Many families have shoved the responsibility of looking after older people onto other people. It is very important that families take responsibility. I am an advocate of home help services, which are brilliant, but asking somebody to come in for half an hour in the morning to get somebody out of bed, dress them and give them their breakfast is ludicrous. It does not work. When my mother was ill, it took two of us to get her into the shower because she would kill you if you took her into the shower. It had nothing to do with her not wanting to be washed; it had to do with the dementia. This, along with getting her breakfast and other things, meant that it was two hours before the two or three of us would manage her. We need to look at the home help service because if there is any chance of making an impact in respect of people not having to stay in hospital, it involves looking at home care and how we facilitate elderly people to stay at home. Even the basics of getting a nurse to go out and dress somebody's wound is very difficult. I agree with Mr. O'Brien when he said that we have lost something like €26 million in home help services. This is sad because we should begin trying to resolve problems that end up in accident and emergency in the home.

I do not have any questions other than the one about the trolleys. Could Mr. O'Brien give us any insight into when Hollybrook will become the link for St James's Hospital in respect of using the beds for the purpose they were provided for?