John Paul Phelan (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Cuffe. It is not a personal attack on him, but when I put down an Adjournment motion and there is not a Minister from the relevant Department present, I always place on record that one should be here. I have never been involved in a debate with Minister of State, Deputy Cuffe, and I hope he will have positive news for me on this issue.

It concerns the fallout from a number of scandals in private nursing homes across the country. The State correctly took a decision to introduce standards of care for patients in both public and private nursing homes across the State and the Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, is the body that is responsible for implementing these standards. Everybody accepts they are necessary and that nursing homes, be they private or public, should have minimum standards of care for their patients.

The reason for this motion is that there is another group of facilities which cater for older persons and which are not nursing homes, but which provide a form of sheltered accommodation, and these are called supported care homes. No provision has been made, as I understand it, in the legislation or regulations dealing with nursing homes for this category. There is a number of them around the country. There is a concentration of them in Kilkenny because the late Dr. Peter Birch, as Bishop of Ossory, was a forward-thinking man in the early 1980s and he donated much church property to local communities, and these supported care homes were developed in those communities.

My difficulty, and the difficulty that these facilities are having at present, is that the HIQA standards for nursing homes are being applied to these supported care homes. The difference is that nursing homes require 24-hour nursing care to be available for patients. Most of the residents - they are not patients - in the supported care homes live independently. Most of them leave the homes during the daytime, go to the shop, to the post office, mix with their friends and go for a drink, but they are not capable of independent living for one reason or another, and they get meals provided communally every day. Indeed, in many such homes, at least in Kilkenny, other elderly persons in the community come into the facilities for the provision of services during the daytime.

The difficulty is that these particular homes are faced with a stark situation at present. They will either have to double, or possibly increase even further than that, the charges to their residents or some of them will have to consider the possibility of closure. Between the five homes in Kilkenny of which I speak, namely the O'Gorman Home in Ballyragget, Prague House, Freshford, Mount Carmel of Callan, St. Joseph's, Kilmaganny and Gahan House in Graighnamanagh, there are over 100 full-time residents, but they cater for a much larger number of people who come in for day-care facilities and services. If these homes are forced to close, obviously, it will be a considerable loss to the local communities concerned.

I hope the Minister of State will be able to provide clarification. I have sought direction from the Department of Health and Children on this issue over the past few months and I have not got a satisfactory answer.

I thank the Cathaoirleach for taking my Adjournment motion concerning these fantastic facilities. In many instances, much of the work that goes into these facilities is voluntary. They raise much of the funding independently through local fund-raising efforts.

What they really want is not no standards because they accept there must be standards for them, but that account be taken that they do not provide 24-hour nursing care. If a resident becomes ill, he or she goes to the acute hospital or goes to a nursing home, be it public or private. If they require that level of care and support, they leave this sheltered accommodation. They want standards that are suitable for the type of care these institutions provide.