Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

On patient advocacy services, when I took over as Minister of State with responsibility for older people in June 2020, I discovered very quickly that there were patient advocacy services only in public and community hospitals and public nursing homes. I moved very quickly to expand patient advocacy services across all public, private and voluntary nursing homes. I am currently expanding this provision to mental health, long-term residential care facilities. Some 10% of residential care facilities have patient advocacy services.

I will seek more funding in the budget for these services. The organisation that provides advocacy services has had to scale up considerably. We are working with it and I will continue to expand that service. It is important that any service user in any long-term residential care facility, especially after what we saw last week on the "RTÉ Investigates" programme, has access to advocacy services. I will continue to roll that out.

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