Michael Moynihan (Cork North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State. There are a number of issues. There are 109 people waiting for services. Is there a policy to reduce the amount of home help hours to existing people, referred to in the document as clients, so as to spread the service more thinly because of the shortage of home care assistants? Strategically, in the Minister of State's own Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, should there not be an incentive put in place to recruit people to the home care assistants courses that are offered in many of the colleges throughout the country? The Minister of State mentioned permits being brought in to help with the service and that is very welcome but there are an awful lot of people who could be recruited. Has there been co-ordination between the HSE and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, to see if a new course can be created into which people could be recruited or equally, into the existing healthcare assistant course? If we do not do something at a fundamental level, we will be back here again. I have to say, from the evidence we are getting, we see some people who are well into their 80s and maybe older and there is talk of them surviving on less hours because of the shortage. We have to stamp that out because we cannot be reducing any services that are there. In some cases we have people who are in acute hospitals or in transition beds and they are waiting. They are fit to go home and would go home if there was a home care package available. That again is contributing to the issues across the hospital services.

I refer to the issue of spreading the services we have more thinly on the ground and what is being done to recruit more people at the bottom end and to make the package for a healthcare assistant more attractive.

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