Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)

My question relates to the residential nursing homes. We heard earlier on about there being no wrong door. Unfortunately, in many cases, particularly those private ones because of the lack of public beds, people have been in the situation where their loved one has been in the wrong place. We heard earlier about some of the scandals relating to it. These are scandals like unsafe practices, institutional abuse, negligence shortening the lives of patients, poor manual handling, lack of equipment, no staff to deliver services, and so on. I presume when you are in a situation where you have your loved one in you ask how it is run and all the rest. You find you are in a situation that your loved one is in that situation. The contract is with your family and that company, but the State has the contract as well. On behalf of many of those families, what penalties does the State put on those private companies that are running these services and which are not delivering the service? For instance, if they do not have the staff for a high-dependency bed or other areas relating to that. We never hear if there is a financial penalty. Does the State recoup the finances relating to those nursing homes, or does it just say it wants them to up their service level? The families have asked me. They are caught in this situation. They can go to court and all the rest, but they ask me what the State's response is. As taxpayers we are paying towards these services, but they are not being delivered.