Mr. Pat Healy:

The nursing home support scheme is a statutory scheme set out in the Nursing Homes Support Scheme Act 2009. Section 7(6) of the Act sets out specifically what a care needs assessment is. It sets out the professionals who would undertake it, which include doctors - in our case it is geriatricians - nursing staff and occupational and physical therapists. When an application is made the first thing that is done is that a care needs assessment is undertaken to determine, based on the criteria, if a person qualifies or not. There are then a comprehensive set of guidelines established in the system as to how those care needs assessments will be undertaken. For some years, since the establishment of the scheme, we have established more than 30 local placement fora at the level of the local health office, as they were known. They have geriatricians on a multidisciplinary team. Social work is often also involved, along with the therapists, nursing staff and geriatricians. They work to a standardised, agreed model.

One reason I asked for a review to be done on this was that, as the Minister has said, there can be a question of standardised interpretation. Part of what we have to do, perhaps, is to make sure that our professionals, who are working on this in a very proactive way, are supported. This is to ensure that when rare cases do come up, as happened recently, they know the full extent of the flexibility they have under the scheme. I await the outcome of the review and the advice I get on this matter. What I intend to do is to establish a national forum to bring together the 30-plus placement fora in order that there is shared learning across the system on what is happening in different places and how things are progressing and in order that cases can be shared and so forth. That would provide a positive system to support the professionals involved in dealing with issues like this.