Ms Gráinne Loughran:

That is a challenge raised by many members of the coalition that are home care providers. The difficulties caused include how the new tender has set an overnight hourly rate of €5 per hour below the daily hourly rate for what is a premium, awake, overnight service. It is unsustainable for a lot of not-for-profit providers to deliver overnight services for almost 20% below daily services. That is not something that is delivered by the HSE. It is outsourced, so it exclusively affects the not-for-profit and private providers. That causes difficulties with many of the smaller providers that are in a lot of ways already on the breadline, to put it like that, when it comes to maintaining sustainable funding for their services.