Mr. Pat Healy:

I will take Deputy O'Reilly's question first. As the 60 staff are full-time whole-time equivalents, they are full-time permanent staff. One of the important parts of what we were trying to do was to get a dedicated team. We have built on the elder abuse teams and now we have these. In 2016, there were about 8,000 notifications of safeguarding concern, which is approximately 300 cases for each team and somewhat more than six cases a week. Clearly, when one looks at the totality, there are large numbers. We are progressively developing the service but as one would go on, one would want to expand the teams as one continues to develop.

The position is that all people at risk of abuse, be it older people or others are covered by the current policy. The issue that is specific to private nursing homes is that there is a constraint on our entitlement to access nursing homes. We neither have a right to access the nursing home in this regard nor we do not have a right of access to records. It is important to state, however, that the majority of private nursing homes have worked very positively with us. In many cases, the safeguarding policy has been adopted by private nursing homes as the policy they operate. That is very positive. The fact that the policy is regulated by HIQA is important because HIQA is inspecting independently and is the regulator that carries out the type of unannounced inspections to which Deputy Durkan referred. There also is access to the Ombudsman for complaints.

Legislation is important to underpin this whole area because there are constraints on what the HSE can and cannot do. While the HSE policy is positive, that area must be dealt with.