Mr. Peter Tyndall:

An earlier question raised the impact of having a statutory scheme for nursing home support and not having a statutory scheme for home care. I fully appreciate our acute hospitals are under great pressure and that finding opportunities to ensure people are able to move on when they no longer require an acute hospital bed is a very important part of managing our healthcare. That is a job the hospital groups and the HSE have to do. If the only money you can get to allow somebody to move on from a hospital bed or the only funding available on a statutory basis to support somebody in such circumstances is funding to support that person in a nursing home, it seems inevitable, although you could not prove it as a consequence, that that is the outcome most likely to occur. That is why there is a focus in the report on the need to ensure we have a funding scheme that is not biased towards institutional care and that we have proper attention given to processes designed to enable people to move on quickly from acute hospitals when they are ready to move but not putting them at risk of a life of institutional care.

I think most of the questions were directed towards the Department of Health and the HSE but I will pick up the point on personal assistant hours. If people are to be enabled to live engaged lives within the community, the bare minimum number of hours will not do that. I know of people who have quite restricted lives as a consequence of their only assistance being the very basic care. Therefore the opportunity to get out and about and engage with people and so on is restricted. That is an important point which is also made in the report.