Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As we know, the nursing home sector has changed in recent decades from a predominantly State-led service to a situation today where approximately 80% of nursing home services are provided by the private sector and 4% by voluntary organisations. As I said earlier, private nursing homes provide vital residential care to over 18,000 people on behalf of the State. It is interesting to note that 15 private companies now control 10,700 beds in the sector. As of 28 November this year, 17 nursing homes have closed or officially notified HIQA that they are going to close. Currently, 11 have closed and six have notified HIQA and are starting to ask the residents to move on. According to legislation in place since 2007, they have to give families and residents six months to find other nursing homes. We are very concerned about the small family-run community nursing homes that are under extreme pressure. I have requested the HSE to work with any small nursing homes that are in trouble to see what we can do to help them. There is a scale with large nursing homes on one side of the sector and family-run or voluntary homes with a small number of beds, maybe 30 or 40, on the other. We have lost approximately 500 beds this year but four new nursing homes have also opened, which brought in 450 beds, so there has been a net loss so far of about 50 beds. In CHO 5, for example, where I am based, we have lost almost 120 beds, while there are other areas that can cope better. We are acutely aware of the situation. We continue to fund the nursing home sector to the tune of €1.4 billion a year, which is a massive amount of money. It is almost one twentieth of the health budget. We will continue to do that. We have schemes in place now for Covid outbreaks and a scheme to deal with inflationary measures. Nursing homes can claim up to €31,500 this year, backdated to 1 July.

The larger nursing homes are also eligible for the Government support scheme whereby up to €10,000 can be claimed per month. This may suit some of them better. They cannot use both schemes. I tailored this particular scheme to the smaller nursing homes. They can claim €31,500 for six months of the year.