Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I wish to raise the issue of home care packages and home support services and the significant waiting lists in the Kildare-west Wicklow-south Dublin area. As the Minister of State is aware, it is called CHO 7. I have been dealing with a number of constituents who include stroke victims, cancer sufferers, people suffering from early onset dementia, older people who need additional support and a person recovering from the removal of their colon. I have been dealing with these cases all summer. Many of these people are in Naas Hospital, other hospitals or the community awaiting these additional supports. They are taking up hospital beds they do not need. There are people on trolleys in Naas Hospital who could be in those hospital beds. The people in those beds who have these issues have applied for home care packages. The waiting list is there because the budget seems to have been eroded earlier in the year. It makes no sense. Those people want to be at home, as would we if we were sick and could be cared for at home.

Some very basic questions need to be asked. First, we must reach a situation where the very significant waiting lists in the Kildare-west Wicklow-Laois area are reduced and dealt with as soon as possible. These are real human stories that are very harrowing to deal with. However, it is also not even smart. Even if it is an accounting exercise on the part of somebody in the HSE or the Department, it is not a good use of resources. We need to support people so that they can be minded at home to free up those hospital beds for people on trolleys who need them because those beds are very expensive for people who are in them, never mind the fact that they do not need or want to be there. If we compare the Kildare area of CHO 7 with CHO 4, which covers Kerry and Cork, we can see they have similar populations of over 650,000 if we include south Dublin in our area yet CHO 4's waiting list in June 2018 was less than a quarter of that of CHO 7. Did they have the same budget to start with, were they managed differently and how has this been allowed to happen? We cannot allow this to happen in the future.

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