Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

I would like to ask the Minister about home care packages. Many Deputies attended a presentation made by the Irish Senior Citizens Parliament yesterday. When one meets senior citizens, one is told that their preferred option is to stay at home, with support. The Minister said that home care packages are expensive. They are primarily privately procured. We are privatising the care of elderly people in their own homes. Why can we not build up the home help service so it is like it used to be? The Minister talks about home help as if it were some kind of newfangled way of looking after people. Is she abandoning the development of the public home care system, involving public health nurses and home helps etc.? While I welcome the provision of an additional 360 home care packages this year, they do not represent much more than a drop in the ocean in terms of the number of elderly people in this country.

Rather than providing for such cutbacks in the HSE, would it not be more cost-effective to develop the public provision of care for people at home? It would mean that elderly people would not have to stay in acute hospitals and we would not have to pay the private sector its top-up profit, not to mention the cost of recruiting professionals and paying their salaries?

See this speech in context