Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle for facilitating me coming in having missed my earlier speaking time. I welcome the Minister of State coming in and making a statement on this critical issue. I acknowledge the work she has done since her appointment. We have seen a significant increase in the annual funding for older people to €2.6 billion this year, and €730 million per annum is being spent on home care. That is money well spent.

The majority of our senior citizens want to remain in their own homes. I urge the Minister of State to move at pace to bring about a model similar to the fair deal model that will enable people to get additional hours in their home. I speak from the experience of working with a family member currently looking for home help. Even the maximum number of hours pales into insignificance in terms of the level of care some people need.

Will the Minister of State ensure people who need home help hours get them? A big thing I notice in my constituency is people being approved home help hours and not having the people to fill those hours. On entering government, we made a commitment to reverse the dependency on private home care and to go back to hiring people directly by the HSE as home care providers. That is not happening. There is an overdependency on private providers and they tend not to want to do night-time or weekend care. Before bringing in any statutory package, the Minister of State needs to look at ensuring people who can stay in their homes with a certain number of home help hours, get those hours. I was dealing with a constituent from Moate last week. Her 93-year-old mother was approved five home help hours per week but cannot get the staff to do them. This is a big issue the Minister of State needs to tackle.

While speaking of statutory care, I want to take the opportunity to reference fair deal and the number of people unaware of the fair deal option. I am dealing with a family whose wife was in long-term nursing home care for sixteen months. She was entitled to fair deal but not encouraged to avail of it. Processing times are too long.

There are people who go into a hospital and have to be discharged directly into a nursing home. In certain instances, the costs in that period between discharge until the fair deal scheme is processed have to be paid from the family's own resources. The Minister of State is shaking her head but it happens in certain instances; I am dealing with it. To be fair, there are officials in her Department helping me overcome that. There are transitional schemes but not everyone is availing of or qualifies for them. There are families paying dearly as they wait for their fair deal application to be processed. I am highlighting to the Minister of State that flexibility needs to be shown in cases like this.

One of the saddest things I experienced when canvassing in the local elections was calling to houses in which people were living on their own. These are people who may not see others for days on end. They were unaware of services like a day care centre. I ask the Minister of State to write to each and every day care centre asking that it reach out to people in its community to make sure they are aware of this service. I raised a case previously in my constituency of a number of senior citizens in a village who were unaware of the local day care centre. I was told they had never applied, but they did not apply because they did not know. From the HSE's perspective, whose responsibility is it to ensure people, particularly those living on their own, are offered day care for a minimum of day per week, where they can come in, meet people and socialise? If the Minister of State takes anything from my contribution, I ask that it be this.

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