Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

What have the HSE and the Government against HSE-employed home helps? There is no doubt that there has been an assault on the hours available to home helps across the country over the past number of years. A total of 1.4 million fewer hours are available now compared to 2010. From a policy point of view, it does not make sense to curtail the number of home help hours available to families that are under huge pressure and stress trying to care for a loved one at home. Home helps are an integral part of the delivery of health care, as patients transfer from an acute hospital setting to a home care setting. However, people are scrounging on a daily basis to access additional hours. They contact local public representatives, including Deputies, to beg and plead for more hours. The number of hours available is not sufficient to cater for the demand.

There is a key problem regarding HSE-employed home helps who are being blackguarded to a certain extent. People who have a contract for X hours cannot secure additional hours. I cannot understand the preference for private companies that provide home help hours. When one does the sums, it does not make economic sense to be preferential towards private companies. It must be acknowledged that HSE-employed home helps have provided a critical, integral service in our communities for many years but the notion that they must work a set number of hours and cannot access additional hours is distasteful.

I would appreciate it if the Minister of State would revisit that policy, which seems to be ingrained on the part of HSE management, to reduce, on a continual basis, HSE employed home helps and preference private companies. If there was a logical or an economic reason for doing that, one could understand it but, by any stretch of the imagination or assessment, there is no benefit gained from operating in this way. I ask the Minister of State to revisit that issue in the broader context.

There are instances where people are being provided with a half and hour of home help care. What can a person do in half an hour? There is a need for the Minister of State to fundamentally review the number of hours of home help care available across the country. Taking account of the regions, there has been an appalling assault on the hours available. Some 1.4 million fewer home help hours are being provided than was the case in 2010. We have an aging population; the demographic curve is in that direction. The stated policy is to transfer people from an acute hospital setting to a home-care setting, yet Government policy in this area leads to the opposite being the case. One of the main reasons we have overcrowded emergency departments - and bedlam and chaos in them on a continual basis - is that we cannot transfer people from an acute hospital setting back to a community-based or home-care setting. An integral element in ensuring that people can remain at home is their level of access to home help care.

In the context of the budget, I urge the Minister of State to not only review the number of home help hours available nationally but also to ensure that home helps employed by the HSE are treated fairly and with dignity and that they are not be continually blackguarded in terms of their hours being consistently reduced and priority and preference being given to private companies. It does not appear that the Minister of State can inform me as to why that is the practice, whether there is a rationale for it or whether a cost-benefit analysis has been carried out. I have been contacted by home helps whose hours have been significantly reduced from 40 to 15. Their basic original contract was for 15 hours, yet they had been working many hours in excess of that for the past number of years. However, when it came to the renewal of their home help hours or providing care for a new client, those hours have been given to private companies.

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