Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 7 February 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion

9:30 am

Mr. Andy Heffernan:

Yes. I bring it back to my lay interpretation of the different types of home care. Different language is used but I would go back to what I would call the continuum or spectrum of home care. On one side there is task-based care, which is about providing more generic services like getting people up in the morning, getting them showered and ready for the day and so on. We provide dementia-specific care, which tends to be that bit longer at two to three hours. Care is provided by people who are trained in the area of dementia and who have significant experience and there is a continuity of care. Then we have what is called day care at home, which would have first arisen during Covid. This is a replication of what happened in day care centres on a one-to-one basis. Once again, it is usually in three to four-hour blocks. That is very much about psychotherapeutic, psychosocial and cognitive interventions but there may also be an element of what the person in the middle does. There is a bit of movement across all three areas. Different people have a different understanding of what home care means. Even in terms of definitions, the criteria, who provides it and how they do it-----

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.