Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for the question. Home help has been a priority for me since taking on this position in the middle of last year, and this is evidenced by the consultation process the Minister and I launched shortly after my appointment to review how we do home help. I have accepted in various fora that the current system is not delivering as it should be. I am a believer that if we always do what we always did, we will always get what we always got, and it is not good enough. The consultation has been completed and we are reviewing it. I hope in the next week or two to publish its results.

The overall macro picture with regard to home help is that this year we increased the budget for home help by €18.25 million and home help hours now have a budget of €408 million per annum. This is a significant budget by any standards but clearly it is not enough. I appreciate this does not, as somebody said before, butter any parsnips for those waiting to get home help hours or waiting to get a service delivered to their house.

The Deputy mentioned Meath and the reduction of 36,000 hours. There are two issues at play. One is that recruitment is a challenge in a number of areas, which is leading to a reduction. We cannot get the staff. It is not a financial issue. It is that we cannot get enough staff to deliver for the demand that is there. We are also seeing a fairly significant increase in the number of intensive home care packages. Last year in Meath we delivered 440 home care packages and this year we have delivered 496 packages, which is an increase of 56 intensive home care packages. The Deputy is aware these packages provide thousands of home help hours when they are added up and this makes up for the shortfall. The issue is the HSE's reporting structure, and it is now working to combine home care packages and home help hours to make it more transparent and create a more straightforward and easier to follow system for counting the hours.

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