Mr. Bernard Gloster:

I want to go beyond those 30 older people's teams, and have general primary care staff going in and out of nursing homes. That is my target for this year, purely based on the principle of equity of access. Of course, not everybody gets access to everything they want. I would equally say, including to Nursing Homes Ireland, that it is not a supplement for nursing home providers not meeting their own responsibility to provide the care they are obliged to provide under the contract. They provide the in-house care and the appropriate care, but if somebody needs access to the primary care service for occupational therapy, physiotherapy, speech and language therapy and some other specified community nursing services, that should be on us. I am intent on doing that.

Last year, we introduced mobile diagnostics for some nursing homes and we were able to substantially reduce the number of people being referred to hospital from nursing homes. We know that if we target our community resources to where the most frail are being cared for, we will not just substantially reduce pressure on hospitals, but we will give people a more appropriate type of service that they need and should be able to get from us. The fact that one lives in a private nursing home should not prevent a person from accessing public healthcare.