Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I commend Sinn Féin on bringing forward this motion. I welcome to the Public Gallery the representatives of nursing homes, including Brian McNamara from Greenpark Nursing Home in Tuam.

This really and truly is an issue about patient care and making sure older people are taken care of properly. We have a divided service at the moment in that big business is getting involved and is in investing in and creating critical mass for itself. I put it to the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, that if we are not careful, we will end up being servants to these people. We have the finest of family-based nursing units in our communities. I will not call them what some people call them. They are run by families, their friends and their relatives. They are providing much-needed employment in rural areas and in local areas. They provide services and jobs ancillary to their business. That is all very fine, but many of these businesses are now operating at a loss. There is something wrong when it is like that, and especially when there is a difference in price for the public community nursing unit per head, which is a lot higher than for the private, small operator.

Transparency is required, setting out exactly what one is paying the community nursing units and for what. I have heard the Minister of State say from time to time that the community nursing homes provide more care, or different care or additional care. I have seen, at first hand, people with high dependency in private nursing homes getting the finest of treatment, and getting everything they require with no questions asked. I do not believe we should be comparing the service. The service is excellent right across any of them but the problem is the difference in pay. It leaves the people who are running these nursing homes in a position where they are saying they will sell or close down as it is not worth it. People who have invested real money in these nursing homes are finding, after nine or ten years, that they are losing money and nobody seems to be listening. The stress levels at the moment are unbelievable for people in these places.

We come back to transparency. Why is there a difference? If the difference can be demonstrated to be A, B, C or D, so what? We need to have a real and immediate response to the crisis we now have. Two nursing homes closed in the Galway-Roscommon area last year. When I talked to the HSE about what it was doing last year in regard to the winter programme, this was the first thing it talked about. Basically, we are going to have more of that, if we are not alert to the fact there are real problems here. I genuinely ask the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, to talk to these people. Let us get a solution.

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