Mr. Michael Fitzgerald:

The HSE would contend that people who generally will take up residential care services in the public nursing homes will have higher levels of dependency than in the private nursing homes. This was borne out and mentioned specifically in the review of fair deal back in 2015. That was the assessment at that stage. Dependency is a huge gamut, really, and it will have a variety of things with different personal needs and requirements. I think there would be different issues there for people with dementia at different levels and indeed for people with different levels of physical need. My comment from a HSE perspective is that we would still contend that in general the HSE will be able to provide the care for people at higher levels of dependency for a very simple fact that the model of staffing the HSE has is significantly higher in nursing than would be the case in the private nursing homes.