Alan Dillon (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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86. To ask the Minister for Health the steps that are being taken to increase home help hours for the elderly; the steps that are being taken to increase the number of homecare workers; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [61345/22]

Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail)
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Addressing the shortage of care-workers in Ireland is an urgent priority for the Government. To this end, I established the cross-departmental Strategic Workforce Advisory Group in March 2022 to examine, and formulate recommendations to address, the challenges in front-line carer roles in the home-support and long-term residential care sectors. Working closely with key stakeholders, the Group examined the recruitment, retention, training, career-development, and pay and conditions of care-workers.

The Report of the Strategic Workforce Advisory Group on Home Carers and Nursing Home Healthcare Assistants was published on 15^thOctober 2022. Providing an overview of the work of the Group and its key findings, the report presents a suite of 16 recommendations spanning the areas of areas of recruitment, pay and conditions of employment, barriers to employment, training and professional development, sectoral reform, and monitoring and implementation.

I strongly endorse all of the Group's recommendations and work towards their implementation has commenced. At a press conference on 30^thNovember, Minister English and I announced that 1,000 General Employment Permits will be made available for home-support workers from January 2023. As recommended by the Advisory Group, these permits will be for full-time positions with a minimum salary of €27,000 per year and a stipulated minimum continuous shift-length of four hours per working day.

All of the recommendations will be monitored on an on-going basis to ensure that they are enacted in full and in a timely manner.