Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to raise what I believe is an important issue and I am pleased the Minister of State with responsibility for this area is here. He does not need me to tell him about the difficulties that exist in our acute hospitals and the significant delays people have in getting access to bed capacity. Much of the elective work is now delayed because of the crisis in accident and emergency departments. Some of that relates to the inability of patients to move from the care facility, which is the acute hospital, into either a step-down facility or back home. Therefore, there is a passage through the system for many.

I have identified what I believe is one of the very considerable difficulties that exist. It is the inability of the HSE or many of the other service providers to be able to hire home care assistants. From his constituency work over the years, the Minister of State will have had people come to him seeking more home care hours to be made available by the State. In order words, they want the State to put money aside to enable people to be cared for in their home and for them to allow them to live out their lives there. That used to be a problem but that is not the problem any more. The money is in place for the service but the problem is the service providers cannot get staff to fill those hours. Many more people could be living out the latter days of their lives in their own home if there were care assistants available to them.

I have met many care assistants and I do so on a regular basis. Some of them are now leaving the service. The only reason they are doing so is that they are not being properly looked after financially. The wages are poor but many of them are prepared to do the job because it is flexible work. What is killing them in the current climate is the cost of travel. The profile of the Minister of State's constituency is not that much different from mine. A carer might care for a person who lives ten or 15 miles from where the carer lives and visit that person at 8 a.m. By 11 a.m. the carer has to be with another person somewhere else. By 2 p.m. the carer has to be with another person. By 5 p.m. the carer has to be with another person and by 9 p.m. the carer might be back with the person he or she visited first that morning.

Carers may travel more than 100 miles, or sometimes 200 miles, in a day depending on the profile of the people they look after. It is not sustainable for those people to be asked to continue to do that work at the rate they are being paid for mileage. It is abysmal. They just about got by when diesel and petrol was somewhere between €1 and €1.12 or €1.13 per litre. It is now €2.13 per litre. These are people on very low incomes in the first instance. They provide a phenomenally valuable service. Without them many more people would be in the care of State, putting a further burden and pressure on the acute services, further lengthening the wait time in places like University Hospital Limerick, UHL.We saw from the HIQA report the appalling display of service available to patients. If we do not intervene at the home care assistant level, the problem is going to get worse. As the price of fuel continues to spiral out of control, and we accept that is outside of our control, these people will not be able to keep their cars on the road and continue to travel and do the great work they are doing. I am appealing to the Minister of State to look at every line item in the budget of his Department and try to find an appropriate amount of money to make it possible for these people to do their work. Their low wages can be dealt with through the normal labour relations mechanism. I have argued about this before and will again. However, there needs to be an urgent intervention putting in place a few extra cent to make it possible for them to do their phenomenal work.