Ms Catherine Keogh:

I wish to comment on the Fórsa members' perspective and that of our home support resource managers. I am just getting to the new title; it was only agreed on Friday. A typical day in the life of those managers could be that on a Sunday evening, he or she receives a a call reporting that one of the home support care assistants is a close Covid contact and he or she cannot go into the home or somebody has symptoms. That worker is there trying to juggle hours. As Mr. Ginley alluded to, it can be so much that they are ringing up a family, with whom they have personal relationships, and asking them, for example, whether they can cover the morning hours for their mam because someone who lives three doors down is in dire need, so the home healthcare assistants are being moved there to do the work. The knock-on effect is that the same resource manager is trying to contact the multidisciplinary team that is dealing with a discharge from a hospital and perhaps contacting a social worker to tell them that the home support package cannot be provided on a particular day, as planned, because they do not have the resources. That frenetic pace of work and the ad hoc, fragmented approach show where the real deficits are. As the Chairman rightly pointed out, at the back of all that are families who are desperate for these resources to be put in place for their loved ones to keep them at home.

I know we keep talking about resourcing the service properly, but it has to be done and it has to be done properly. It has to be done at a national level and it has to be standardised. The members of SIPTU within the public sector now get paid for their travel. It was agreed and it was the right thing to do. However, what the HSE did not do behind it was to bring in an IT system that would create a streamlined function, in this day and age. Instead, there are home support managers who, without any clerical administrative support, are trying to manually update hours on a day-to-day basis as people hand them in a sheet while they travel to a number of homes. It is not right for a worker in this day and age to be waiting on payment. It is also not a good use of HSE resources. Sometimes, because Fórsa proudly represents clerical administrative workers, people say that there are too many managers in the system and there are too many clerical administrative staff. I am often the one who says that there needs to be more. The reason I say that is that the appropriate people should be doing the appropriate work. It makes sense to me to resource home support with a proper clerical administrative function so that the resource manager who is juggling the needs of the clients, the workers and the multidisciplinary teams has somebody there inputting timesheets. A senior manager, with all his or her skills, should not be having to spend three hours of his or her evening updating timesheets because the resources are not there. That is a bad use of money. The actual impact of all of this, because we are all citizens and family members and we all have personal experience of this, is people at home not getting the service they need. It is stark. That is why I made the point that investment in home support services is actually a really good use of taxpayers' money.