Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I would strongly disagree with that. I understand that might be the witnesses' position but it certainly is not the experience that has been relayed to me.

In terms of ensuring the resilience of the sector, we know there are obvious complications with a for-profit model for any form of healthcare. If one is chasing a profit all the time, it does not necessarily translate into good outcomes for patients, notwithstanding that there are many private nursing homes which are doing an absolutely fantastic job, thanks, in the main, to the men and women and staff working hard in them. On harmonising pay and conditions for workers, because we know what happened at the start where many people were transferred from the nursing home sector to the acute hospital sector, would Professor Kelleher see harmonising the terms and conditions, pay, etc., of those workers in the private sector – I mean bringing them up rather than bringing down those of the public service workers – as being important in terms of building resilience in the nursing home sector in the future?