Mr. Finbarr Colfer:

I thank members for their questions. One question concerned the number of centres we have inspected to date. Since commencement in November 2013, we have undertaken 2,551 inspections. As of April last year, we had inspected every service and every designated centre, so all centres have had an inspection. The purpose of the inspection is to examine the quality of the service being provided, what it is like for the people who live in those centres to live there and how the governance arrangements for those centres are effecting a good service for people living there.

Regarding the respite service, there is a variety of different respite formats or types of service in existence, including dedicated respite services, dedicated children's respite and dedicated adult respite. Some services alternate their service between children and adults but there is not a consistency across the country in how those services are delivered. I think what Senator Colm Burke was referring to is the fact that there are difficulties surrounding places where there is a resident in a service for most of the week and when a resident is absent, somebody else avails of respite. One difficulty that has come up for us in that regard is that when we talk to residents themselves, when we observe what is happening in those kinds of centres, some of the issues that have come up have concerned the people visiting the centre for short periods. They are in the other person's personal space and there are inadequate measures in many cases regarding the personal property of the people normally resident in the centre. Residents themselves have described situations in which their personal items have been damaged, family photographs have been torn up and other visiting residents have used their personal property. For us, this is not an issue for the person coming to visit the centre, but rather an issue of how that service is managed and how the provider is ensuring that the dignity and privacy of the resident who is there normally are maintained. Residents have mentioned other issues to us. On one inspection, I was told by a resident that when they returned from a holiday away, their mattress smelled very foul even though they had clean sheets on it. There are issues surrounding the sharing of rooms and people entering rooms. If these issues are not being managed correctly, we require providers either to put measures in place to manage them correctly or to consider whether it is an appropriate way of using the person's room.

One question Senator Burke asked concerned how providers are facilitated to address these issues. When we find non-compliance, we identify it very clearly to the provider, usually on the inspection, and follow up with a report afterwards in writing. The provider is offered an opportunity to correct anything we may have got wrong at that point. Where that is an issue, the provider then considers what measures need to be taken and we ask the provider to come back to us and tell us what they will do to take care of both residents and the timeframe within which they will do so. If the situation is critical and risk is involved, we will be more assertive in requesting timeframes. However, if it is not a situation of risk, we ask the providers to tell us what they intend to do and we will then go out afterwards and verify whether that has been effective in dealing with the issues. In many cases, the actions taken by providers are effective but sometimes providers choose to cease the arrangement because they are not satisfied themselves that they can address the issues that are arising from that respite service.

We are very conscious that many people are availing of day care services which are unregulated but also that people have future needs. As our CEO mentioned earlier, our focus is on inspection, whether assessments have been conducted of people's future needs and whether there is planning in place in that regard. Regarding actual delivery on those, we ask the providers how they are engaging with the HSE to secure the future planning for people. At present, however, our inspectors do not have any authority to assess or examine day care services or the needs of people within those services because they fall out of the scheme of regulation.