Marc MacSharry (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will proceed. I am sure we are all aware of Health's Ageing Crisis: Time For Action, A Future Strategy for Ireland's Long-Term Residential Care Sector, prepared by BDO, which predicts that we will have a deficit of approximately 8,000 beds by 2021. It will probably be half of that by 2016 and we took 700 out this year. This is the HSE's position. The Centre for Ageing Research and Development in Ireland's report on future demand for long-term care stressed that even with the greater emphasis on care at home and more resources provided to realise it, the demand for residential care will increase significantly in the next decade.
Age Action has claimed that the switch in some of the funding from nursing home supports to community supports that the HSE plans will be insufficient to meet the needs of the sickest and oldest people who will be affected. The National Economic and Social Council's Quality and Standards in Human Service in Ireland: Residential Care for Older People report in July 2012 recommended that "A problem-solving group of those influencing provision of long term care (e.g. providers, the Department of Health, and HIQA) may be useful to examine and address the challenges of providing sufficient quality long term care in an equitable and sustainable way". In essence the purpose of our motion is to see a move to that.
The BDO report estimated that for every 1,000 people who cannot access nursing home care due to the State's strategy, the cost to the Exchequer will be €273 million annually in addition to the immeasurable impact on people's families and the acute hospital system. Notwithstanding the ambition of all of us to be cared for at home, in reality it is impossible for that to be the case for everybody. Without space for these people who require residential care, it will effectively have a huge impact on the acute-hospital system. While I did not check the website today to see how many are on trolleys in hospitals, we all know how those headlines are frequently used. Our acute-hospital system is under serious pressure at the moment as a result of cutbacks.
Last week I dealt with the case of an 84-year old man who had stents inserted in University College Hospital Galway and was dispatched to the coronary-care unit in Sligo. However, the wonderful managers in our new hospital group did not check appropriately with the hospital in Sligo to ensure there was a bed for this 84-year old cardiac patient who had just had a procedure. When the family could not find their 84-year old relative in the coronary-care unit, they managed to find him in the accident and emergency unit where he stayed for four hours.
These are the kinds of pressures already on the health system and Government Members are saying - with a straight face it would seem - that we can continue without a plan and without resources to provide adequate care for the elderly. I gave examples at the beginning of how we have collectively failed to do that. Recent budgets have made cuts without focusing on those people who have a little bit more and, while they would not like it, could contribute a bit more to secure the relative health of our elderly population.
I hope the motion can be taken in the spirit in which it was tabled. It is non-adversarial and merely proposes that the Government set up, without any cost to the Exchequer, a forum with the stakeholders, including some of the groups I have mentioned, to move the debate forward with tangible proposals and funding arrangements, which will obviously need to be innovative.
I thank Age Action, Nursing Homes Ireland, the Centre for Ageing Research and Development in Ireland, Third Age, and the National Economic and Social Council for their contributions and work in this area so far.