Dáil debates

Thursday, 13 October 2005

 

Nursing Home Subventions.

4:00 pm

Jerry Cowley (Mayo, Independent)

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise this important issue. The HSE western area has decided to abolish the payment of enhanced subvention for nursing home residents due to funding shortfalls. This is an unacceptable cutback. Although 117 people in Mayo in receipt of enhanced subvention will continue to receive it, anyone else without independent means requiring a nursing home place will no longer be able to afford it. In the case of a rock bottom nursing home tab of €450 per week a funding shortfall of €100 per week will exist.

Cutbacks of some 100 beds have been made in Mayo in recent years. As the State is unable to provide sufficient public residential beds, older people will occupy even more acute hospital beds for longer periods because there is nowhere else for them to go. This will worsen the trolley chaos that already exists. The entire subvention scheme is unacceptable and is in disarray.

Nationally there is disparity between amounts payable for a nursing home place. For enhanced subvention the maximum amounts payable, after subvention and pension payments, range from €680 or more in the east of Ireland to €30 in the mid-west. This range across the country is unacceptable, especially in respect of the new HSE set-up where so much uniformity had been promised. Older people need some certainty on the funding available so that plans can be made. If nursing home places are needed there must be certainty on availability of places.

I urge the Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Mary Harney, to address the chaos that exists by providing the necessary funding to the HSE to restore enhanced subvention payments. The HSE does not receive a designated budget to make these payments. In recent years services had to be cut back in order to make these payments. Our older people deserve better than to be subjected to this additional trauma.

Enhanced subvention exists for people who have nothing else. Means testing has proved that these people have nothing, no money except the pension, no land, no property and no relatives with money. If relatives exist they do not have money and the old people are totally impoverished. These people are at the mercy of the State and it is letting them down and I regard this as another cutback. In the HSE western area the maximum subvention is €220 per week and once a pension is added to this there remains a funding shortfall of €100. Enhanced subvention is a necessary top-up for those people. Otherwise, where can they go? They will end up occupying a hospital bed. If the State does not pay this top-up for them, they will be unable to afford a nursing home place and will continue to occupy that hospital bed, thereby unwittingly depriving someone with an acute condition of that bed. A person will be on a trolley downstairs in a hospital because the bed upstairs is occupied by an older person who would prefer to be in a nursing home.

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