Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)

I will go back to the comments made earlier about the additional capacity - option A, as the witnesses called it, or what we would just call "decency". The concern I have - and I will finish on this - is the wait until 2029. It is simply not acceptable. When HIQA did its report, did it look at, for instance, additional nursing home spaces in the area, home help or care packages? Anybody who deals with people in a hospital will notice people who are ready to come out but there is nowhere for them to go. That is the simplest way to fix capacity issues. I would specifically like to know if HIQA has looked at nursing home care packages.

We opened a fantastic facility at St. Camillus Community Hospital, a 50-bed unit. The problem there is it will not take dementia patients because the Government did not allocate any money to deal with dementia patients for a nursing home. How the hell could that have happened in this day and age? There is another unit and I am not sure if it is for the witnesses to answer this but we cannot have this one opening and not taking dementia patients. It is absolutely insane that there is no provision for people with dementia to go into the nursing homes we are building.