Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending and dealing with the queries raised. I thank all staff who worked over Christmas and work week in and week out. It is important to acknowledge staff are in hospitals every weekend, whether consultants, junior doctors or nursing staff. An impression is given that sometimes healthcare is only provided from Monday to Friday between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. It is important to acknowledge all the staff who work into the early hours of the morning and who are sometimes still in theatre or dealing with patients at 3 a.m. and 4 a.m.

I will speak about the plan to deal with a sudden increase in numbers entering hospitals and the discharge procedure. Witnesses are aware of the survey done by Nursing Homes Ireland. Out of 430 nursing homes, 210 responded and 147 of those identified 740 vacant beds in nursing homes. I contacted a number of nursing homes over the last three weeks, not one of which had been contacted by the HSE in the previous eight weeks. The calls only appeared to start happening once Nursing Homes Ireland published the survey. I do not understand why a backlog of people had been signed out by the doctors and discharged with no mechanism in place to get them into nursing homes or step-down facilities. Why were the nursing homes not involved in planning that?

I also spoke to a nursing home which had contracted beds with the HSE. Those beds were vacant when over 600 people were waiting to be discharged from hospitals. Great emphasis was put on doctors needing to sign out people at weekends. Were the administration staff there to follow up and make sure the person could be discharged to a nursing home or step-down facility? Why was there no contact with the nursing homes in that eight-week period?