Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the opportunity to speak in these statements. Like everyone, I was appalled by what I saw on the "RTÉ Investigates" programme. The flood of emails and phone calls that came in the following day from sons and daughters of elderly people who are in nursing home care, fearing that HIQA does not have eyes correctly on the situation in many scenarios. I agree with others that it has unfairly tarnished best-practice healthcare for older people. Sometimes the reaction to these things is rightly an outpouring of anger, frustration and huge upset, but sometimes that spills over into painting all with the one brush, which is not the case.

It is important that when HIQA identifies areas of non-compliance and neglect, it uses the ultimate nuclear option to shut down some of those facilities. I know that creates other huge problems for healthcare, such as where do the residents go and how do we provide for their needs? That is the ultimate sanction HIQA has over them. It should not be a roll-over after an inspection and that it will see how they have improved the next time. It needs to use the ultimate sanction sparingly, but in scenarios like this it should have been used.

As others have said, State-provided care, or the old county homes as people call them, such as St. Joseph's in Ennis and St, Camillus's in Limerick which a lot of people in my area would go to, provide quality care. The State should be more involved. In the previous Dáil, Milford hospice in Limerick, which is a cause and a hospital close to the Minister of State's heart, my heart and the hearts of most people in the mid-west moved over to a section 38 organisation. That was transformative and incredible. It no longer has to go around shaking the biscuit tin, trying to collect money and holding fundraiser after fundraiser. It now has a direct line of funding that means it can get down to the real high quality care it provides. More of that needs to happen.

On staffing stability, as recruitment embargoes in various areas of the HSE begin to lift, there is a real fear in the voluntary not-for-profit nursing home sector that it will begin haemorrhaging some of the nurses brought in from overseas who will leave and migrate to the HSE, having gone through all the paperwork and rigamarole of bringing them in on visas and training them up to the highest standards of Irish healthcare. The Minister of State needs to have eyes on that scenario.

The Minister of State's colleague, the Minister for Health, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, has directed HIQA to look at the ESRI report when it examines the University Hospital Limerick capacity for emergency care. In light of that ESRI report, which overwhelmingly identifies the need for new hospital beds and new hospital environments, some of that data needs to be fed into nursing home care. Do we have enough nursing home beds and facilities, public and private, going forward? We already know what the answer will be. Let us see it and let it lead public policy. I wish the Minister of State well in his role during the lifetime of this Government.

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