Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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460. To ask the Minister for Health if a statutory regulatory structure for home care packages exists within the public and private sectors to protect users of the service. [11999/18]

Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael)
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The Government is committed to promoting care in the community so that people can continue to live with confidence, security and dignity in their own homes for as long as possible. To support this, my Department is developing a new statutory scheme for the financing and regulation of home care services. The Department is currently engaged in a detailed process to progress this.

In the meantime the HSE is progressing a range of measures to improve Home Care provision overall, to standardise services nationally and to promote quality and safety. In 2012 the HSE introduced a Procurement Framework for Home Care Services. This framework, which requires service providers to meet defined minimum standards applied to services procured by the HSE from external providers and the process was most recently repeated in 2016.  Providers of home care services are monitored through Service Level Agreements with the HSE.  They are required to provide a prescribed range of information in relation to the services they provide, and are supervised through regular local operational meetings and reviews of clients' care plans. The purpose of these measures is to promote quality and safety and to ensure a more standardised approach to service provision nationally. Home Care Services are reviewed regularly by the HSE. In addition, the HSE has in place a complaints procedure that is available to all service users.