Ms Laura Casey:

It is twofold. It is for the Department and the HSE in terms of service planning, projecting demand into the future and ensuring there are sufficient resources across the sector. Baseline data that enable us to project demand into the future will be important. The second purpose is very much around user choice. The findings from the first care experience survey within the nursing home sector were published quite recently. One of its findings was that approximately 30% of residents felt they did not have enough information about the nursing home they went into in advance of them going into it. Some of the data will help to inform prospective residents and families when choosing a nursing home in the future. There are two purposes to the data collection. One is more around national planning and service planning within the nursing home sector, and the other is for families and residents.

The heads provide that HIQA and the chief inspector will use this information for their own purposes to inform their regulatory oversight of the sector. That relates more to key operational data on resident profile, staffing profile and bed profile in the sector. There are very presently very few data, given the nature of the sector, that give us full oversight.