Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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30. To ask the Minister for Health the efforts being made by CHO 8 in Louth in 2022 to recruit and retain homecarers; the changes in the numbers of HSE-employed homecarers in the Louth area in 2022; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [60541/22]

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 frontline carer roles in the home support and long-term residential care sectors.  The Report of the Advisory Group was published on 15 October 2022. 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 can confirm that work towards their implementation has commenced. I will be closely monitoring this implementation on an on-going basis to ensure that the recommendations are enacted in a full and timely manner.

On the 30 November, 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. A 2 year contract of employment with a Home Care Provider is part of the permit requirement. 

The HSE has advised my Department that there has been ongoing recruitment of Homecare Support Assistants (HCSA) within Louth as part of an overall CHO8 rolling recruitment campaign. This has resulted in 15 additional HCSAs commencing in Louth in 2022. An additional 6 HCSAs will commence in January 2023. The HSE has further advised that New HCSAs receive full 39 hour contracts and all HCSAs now have breaks and travel time built into their rosters.