Colm Burke (Cork North-Central, Fine Gael)

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy O’Donnell, for coming into the House at this late hour to deal with this issue. I very much appreciate it. As the Minister of State knows, this is an extremely important issue. It is to ask the Department of Health whether it intends to put in place a national nursing home care policy following on from the recent publication of the new ESRI report, which projects that we need to grow the number of both short-term and long-stay beds in nursing homes, and whether the Minister of State will make a statement on the matter.

I have been involved behind the scenes in the nursing home sector for the past 20 years. In 2004, as a result of a legal challenge – I have mentioned this previously in this House – that a colleague and I took against the Department and the health boards at the time, more than €450 million had to be refunded. This led to the creation of the fair deal scheme. The challenge we now have from the ESRI report is that it clearly sets out the need for a dedicated national nursing home care policy. Short-stay bed requirements are projected to grow from 3,745 beds in 2022 to between 6,420 and 7,265 beds by 2040, which is a growth of between 72% and 94%. Long-stay bed requirements are projected to grow from 29,579 beds in 2022 to between 47,590 and 53,270 beds by 2040, a growth of between 61% and 80%. In fact, if you take the ESRI report, it suggests that we will require a minimum of 21,056 additional nursing home beds over the next 14 years by 2040. That is 1,403 beds per annum over the next 15 years.

To do that, we need a plan. I am not convinced that we are looking long term. Likewise, what happened in 2004 is that there was not a long-term plan. It was a case of saying how lucky people were with regard to the supports they had got and whether they were in a public nursing home or a private nursing home. We currently have 32,000 people in nursing home care. We need to have a national framework setting out a guide to integration of people in nursing homes, a guide to the long-term funding, a guide to the regulation and also rights-based planning. We have seen the recent reports from RTÉ that have highlighted the issues regarding where there is not sufficient support for patients and patients not being treated in a proper manner.

All of the evidence is that we will have a growing number of people over 65. As the Minister of State knows, the age profile is changing. In 2011, we had something like 600,000 people over 65. The last figure was 831,000. Within four years, there will be 1 million people over 65. Therefore, the growth in demand for nursing home beds will come at a really fast pace. We also need to make sure that we have step-down beds to get people out of hospital on time. That is a problem. I ask the Minister of State if we have a plan that we intend to put in place and what the timescale is.

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