Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 10 September 2020

Special Committee on Covid-19 Response

Examination of HIQA Report on the Impact of Covid-19 on Nursing Homes in Ireland

Mr. Phelim Quinn:

I thank the Deputy for the questions. I will respond to some of them and I will then hand over to my colleagues to provide some of the detail on other questions.

On rapid testing, the specific test used is the oral and nasopharyngeal swab test. I understand that NPHET and the expert advisory group are currently considering additional forms of testing. We are aware of, and support, the programme of serial testing within nursing homes that has been able to identify a number of positive cases and enabled the sector and public health departments to manage specific cases within nursing homes.

In response to the question on HIQA staff, I would say we do not have enough staff to deal with Covid-19 and the post-Covid-19 environment. However, we welcome the recent announcement of nine additional staff. I also acknowledge the very significant additional work that has been identified for us in the report of the expert panel. As I mentioned, we have lodged a business case with the Department of Health, including a workforce plan which addresses several of those key issues.

Another question concerned the reasons people are in nursing homes. We believe that as time passes, the regulatory environment should reflect the emergence of new models of care such as those described in the Sláintecare report. We fully support the premise that people should be cared for in or as close as possible to their homes for as long as possible. The Deputy is right to point out that older persons' care in Ireland has been very heavily weighted towards residential care as a default. If we embrace the principles and models articulated in the Sláintecare report, we believe those models would progress just as the Deputy has described. I will defer to Ms Cliffe on some of the other issues the committee has raised.

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