Results 1-20 of 37 for carers segment:8820625

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Seán Crowe: The purpose of today's meeting is to engage with representatives from the Alzheimer Society of Ireland and Family Carers Ireland on the health needs of persons with dementia and the services available to them. I am pleased to welcome from the Alzheimer Society of Ireland Mr. Andy Heffernan, chief executive officer, Ms Clodagh Whelan, advocacy manager, and Dr. Laura O'Philbin, research and...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

...for older people, Deputy Butler. This funding ensures our services continue to grow. In 2023, we delivered just under 126,000 home care hours and 78,000 day care at home hours. We trained 819 family carers to support their loved ones with dementia and our team of dementia advisers had 4,674 new referrals and more than 13,000 individual meetings. Our day centres had more than 63,000...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Seán Crowe: I thank Mr. Heffernan. I invite Mr. Dunne to make opening remarks on behalf of Family Carers Ireland.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Mr. John Dunne: On behalf of Family Carers Ireland, I thank the committee for giving us the opportunity to address the health needs of persons with dementia and the services available for them. We are pleased to be appearing with the Alzheimer Society of Ireland. We have long history of co-operation in supporting families caring for someone with dementia. Examples of our engagement on...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Colm Burke: I thank the witnesses for their presentations this morning and for all the work they are doing in this area, which is challenging. We talk about family carers and the need for them to receive support. One of the problems that has arisen, in particular as it has got more difficult since Covid, is with them getting a break, in other words, two weeks of respite care. What information are the...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Ms Clodagh Whelan: We hear directly from family carers that there are two issues that arise. The first is the struggle to find respite places. Anecdotally, we hear via our service managers, helplines and dementia advisers, that family carers need a break from their caring role and respite is not available. There is another issue, however, which is that sometimes respite in an...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Colm Burke: ...the witnesses make for the people who are providing home care? For instance, I have an issue at the moment where a lady is spending four to five hours every day with her elderly mother and her carer's allowance, even though it was only €130 a week, has been withdrawn. I do not understand why it has been withdrawn. We are dealing with an appeal at the moment. I wonder about the...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Mr. John Dunne: I echo the answer to the question earlier. In our experience, residential respite is typically preferred by carers of younger people who regard the respite as a holiday, a break and a chance to socialise. I cannot speak specifically for dementia, but for older people in general, they prefer to have respite at home in a way that sustains their routines. We provide what we...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

...the person who is struggling financially caring for their mother, who is living with dementia. That is something that is important to look at, and that we know from our research with Family Carers Ireland. It was based on 2022 data that at least 50% of family carers of people living with dementia were struggling financially. We had our own research in 2023 that bore that out again. For...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Pauline Tully: ...Carole Beattie and all the supporters of the Alzheimer's Society branch in Cavan for the work they do. I also want to acknowledge the work that both of the witnesses' organisations do to support carers and people with dementia. We are talking about supports for people with dementia and those who are caring for them. It can be a frightening time when somebody is first diagnosed with...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

...would still apply at the regional level. The approach to the allocation of home care, for example, has always been highly fragmented across the different CHOs and I would imagine my colleagues in Family Carers Ireland have a view on that too. We operate across the seven CHOs and the allocation of what we provide in tandem with the HSE can be very CHO-specific. We would be looking for a...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

..., which presumably incorporated what was going to be done everywhere, there were still lots of discrepancies or unevenness at local level. I mentioned CHO 2 earlier. Overall, the expenditure on carer respite is pretty much in line with the model but on the ground it operates differently because of historic anomalies which have not been addressed. CHO 2 is not the worst in the country...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

...disparities and inequalities one can imagine how incredible it would be for us to be able to say that a certain amount of people living with dementia are here and we have a certain amount of family carers there. It would help us to plan services if we could feed into that important information.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Bernard Durkan: ...this morning. I have watched with interest what they have had to say. From my own experience of dealing with constituents, this is a very important subject because it is forever where the carers are concerned. The carer has to deal with a situation that changes from time to time and gets inexorably worse. Unless family members are readily at hand to interchange with them, carers have...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Frances Black: ...as a greater proportion of society will rely on various forms of assistance to their own lives. It is so important that we design policies and support people with dementia, and particularly their carers. Regarding the area I want to touch on, the witnesses have touched on it a little bit but I want to get a little bit more information around therapeutic care. With regard to somebody...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

...factor set out by the Senator. However, people can live well and live better, and that is the message we want to get out. Regarding psychotherapeutic inputs, we have found, through our family carer training, that some of the initial modules are nearly fully taken up with the emotional needs of the family members undertaking the training. They have not fully come to terms with their...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Dr. Laura O'Philbin: As we know, caring can be very rewarding and fulfilling but it can also be very stressful, as Deputy Durkan mentioned. The national carers' strategy states that family carers should be supported to maintain their own health and well-being. We produced a research paper last year entitled The Experience of Dementia in Ireland: A Snapshot in Time. It would be remiss of...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

...they have going positively for them, look at what potential they can bring in with additional support and see if they can stabilise it. One of our earliest realisations when it came to supporting carers was that not everybody can continue caring. People get to the end of the road, where it is just not reasonable or practical anymore. Recognising that as a step means when you work back...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

...sat her family down and told them things had to change - she had rights. That is what we are hoping for. People were using the information they learned at medical appointments. As well as family carer training, we have to focus on empowering people living with dementia to ask for what they want, to ensure that they are not just recipients of care. That is really important.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health: Health Needs of Persons with Dementia and the Services Available: Discussion (7 Feb 2024)

Ms Clare Duffy: Of course there is the emotional side of it and a lot of our time is spent supporting carers around that but we also spend an awful lot of time supporting families with practical stuff because at some stage, that practical stuff has to kick in. A lot of our time is spent fighting for better supports and rights for carers and on things like the Work Life Balance and...