Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will be very brief. The pilot study of two nursing homes in Cork was on long-stay care and not transitional or short-term care. Following training at the nursing homes, admissions to accident and emergency departments were reduced. In saying that, the nursing homes where the training was carried out did not have a high incidence of admissions because they were very good at what they did. Clearly, there are GPs who would not be familiar with the person concerned on an ongoing basis. There are also some nurses who are worried about how to deal with people in later life who have become acutely unwell. We have to understand those factors too. It is about the type of training we can introduce to ensure that people do not end up in accident and emergency departments unnecessarily. Nursing homes must be part of the argument, but centrally, GPs have to be part of it as well.