Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Tully for her continued interest. At the outset I want to say that she did raise the issue previously about personalised hours for home care in the Dáil and I checked it out afterwards; I apologise as I did not realise they were available in community healthcare organisation, CHO, 1 although it is not available across the other CHOs. This used to be available previously and they are an area that I think should be in the tender going forward. I have put that on the record and I believe they work for some people but not everyone. The day Deputy Tully raised it I thought she was actually speaking about disability hours and I want to clarify that she was completely right and that they are available in her area but not in the other eight CHOs. It probably deals with people who find it very difficult to get support at the weekend so a budget was provided for them.

Deputy Tully said that disability does not disappear at 65 and it certainly does not but there is not a cut-off at 65 for people with disabilities. There are people over 65 in receipt of day services and home support through disability services but I understand the point she is making and they are based on individual need. At the moment we are developing the interRAI which is the standardised assessment to ensure transparency in decision-making. We want to move to a situation where people can be cared for completely at home and we want to put a scheme in place where people do not have to go into a nursing home even though they might require nursing home care. In order to do this we have to roll out the interRAI standardised assessment. We currently have four pilot sites in operation throughout the country and we are currently recruiting 128 interRAI assessors. Recruitment is starting and Ms McArdle will speak further on that.