Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the Deputy has raised this issue with me on several occasions.

Work is ongoing in the Department of Health to progress the development of a new statutory scheme to support people to live in their own homes. Recruitment for 130 posts to support the national roll-out of international resident assessment instrument, interRAI, as a standard assessment tool for care needs is scheduled to commence this quarter. A national home support office is in the process of being established and a home support pilot commenced this month in one site, with the other pilot sites to be fully operational by January 2022. I was disappointed that the four sites did not commence operation in October. The only reason was the recruitment of staff. It was not due to lack of funding. We have started in one site and the other three sites will commence. This is to test the statutory home care model in four sites to provide us with information as we go forward.

On home care specifically, last year, I secured an additional €150 million for home support, which provides for an additional 5 million hours. My budget for home support this year is €666 million, which is a vast amount. The HSE target is to deliver 24 million hours of home support this year. It is estimated that, by the end of September, 15 million hours had been provided to more than 53,000 people. Notwithstanding the challenges we have, this is approximately 2.2 million more home hours compared to the same period last year. The funding secured in budget 2021 to provide these additional 5 million hours has been maintained for next year.

Significant progress has been made overall on reducing waiting lists for people awaiting funding approval for home support from 7,800 in January 2020 to just under 400 in September. I will conclude in the next part of my reply.

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