Mr. Liam O'Sullivan:

I thank the joint committee for the invitation to attend this morning. I will share my time with my colleagues from the Alzheimer Society of Ireland and the Irish Wheelchair Association.

Care Alliance's focus is on family carers and on supporting our member organisations and others to better support such carers. For many families, State funded home care provision can be a key support in keeping people well at home. I refer the committee to our recent report on home care, published in October, copies of which I have here.

I am glad to say there is much consensus on home care - the importance of it, the good value it represents and the likely future demand for it. On the latter point, the 2017 ESRI report speaks of the need for what we estimate to be a 70% increase in home care support by 2030, from a current provision of 17 million hours to an estimated 30 million hours. That figure is reinforced by recent correspondence I understand Deputy Donnelly received from the HSE in its projections on future demand.

We welcome the Department of Health review of home care but we are concerned about its slow progress to date. We, alongside a group of more than 20 other NGOs, are engaging actively with the relevant Department officials in articulating a vision for the future of home care and we, in Care Alliance, appreciate that it will take political courage to grapple with the challenging issues of funding. The committee last week discussed the HSE budgetary overruns. To put it in context, the likely acute hospital overrun of €225 million represents more than 50% of the entire home care budget for 2018.

Finally, I echo the comments of the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, at this committee last week about the unhelpful dominant narrative of hospital trolleys and that the focus needs to be more on how long people are waiting for a service, specifically, a home care service. In that regard, we have asked the HSE to include this as a key metric in its 2019 service plan.