Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent Ireland Party)

The report by "RTÉ Investigates" makes me sick to my stomach that this could happen. I look at the nursing homes around Limerick and other nursing homes I have visited. Through social events that we do, such as vintage events, we recreate lives of people who are in the nursing homes. We bring in some of the older stuff in to them and see what the nursing homes do. I have been at a lot of nursing homes and we have done this. None of the bigger nursing homes, those with 100 beds or that, do this. The community nursing homes, the smaller ones with 25 beds all the way up to 50 beds, have done this. What is that telling us? Are we getting to a point now where companies buy out nursing homes and are just asking how many people they can get in and how many they can look after? It is a money trail rather than a care trail. I was in a nursing home that gives excellent care but it was an older nursing home. HIQA officials came in and said one of the bedrooms was four inches too small for its standards. The person who was in the nursing home said, "It is perfect, I love it and I am happy there." They had to remove the elderly person who was in that room, spend €20,000 to move a wall four inches because of HIQA standards, rather than going in and asking the person if it was acceptable to them, if they were happy there, if the nursing home was doing everything in its power to protect them and if they were looking after them and all their care. HIQA officials did not ask that; they looked at a book and decided the room did not meet standards. The standard is the care of the patient. The standard is the smile on their faces when they see you coming in and they say you are welcome. We have gone into nursing homes that are going industrial. They push them in, pack as many as they can in, have a limited number of staff and provide the minimum amount of community spirit in the place. If there are too many people in one nursing home in one setting, it becomes institutionalised. In smaller settings, which are smaller nursing homes, people seem to be happier. Why do we not put a cap on numbers so that nursing homes cannot have any more than 25 people? If they do, they need to have a separate setting, even a separate floor or whatever they have to do. That is the community. The community is built around the people in there and the care is built up. Instead of "RTÉ Investigates" going in, let us see whether it works and whether people are happy in the settings they are in and rate a lot of the nursing homes that are providing excellent care. We could rate them on that, promote the good ones and weed out the bad ones.

See this speech in context