Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This is one of the areas that is exciting and that we can make an awful lot of progress on in the coming years. When we launched the expert review on nursing homes, one of the leads, who is a consultant geriatrician, was comparing the percentage of people we have in nursing homes in Ireland with the percentage in Finland. Finland is probably seen as the best example. I cannot remember the exact figure but it is at a fraction of what we are at. The goal is to keep people at home.

The Minister of State, Deputy Butler, is taking a lead on this. We have fully funded the interRAI system for next year. We are rolling that out straightaway and a number of assessors are being hired. They will do a full assessment of every person's needs. Rather than saying one can have five hours or six hours, it will be a bespoke individual assessment. The programme for Government commitment on increased hours was for 5 million hours over five years. We have allocated funding in the health budget for next year for all 5 million of those hours next year. That does not mean we will not do any more in the future. We are going for this.

The Deputy is correct that it is not enough to have the systems and the money. We have to have the carers and to do that we have to look at caring as a profession and at the kind of supports they need. The exact matters the Deputy is talking about will be considered by myself, the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, and the sector. I am excited about this. If we get this right, we can revolutionise growing older in this country and have far more people living at home for longer. Our length of stays in nursing homes and so forth are out of kilter with many other countries. There is a real opportunity here.