Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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The Programme for Government commits to ‘Introduce a statutory scheme to support people to live in their own homes, which will provide equitable access to high-quality, regulated home care’. The new scheme aims to provide equitable, transparent access to home support services based on their assessed care needs. It is InterRAI standardised outputs that will be used to determine prioritisation and levels of care required. The HSE Home Support Steering Group identified the requirement to focus InterRAI implementation across home support services and have begun recruitment process for 128 interRAI Care Needs Facilitators. The development of a reformed model of service delivery for home support and the testing of this across four pilot sites has concluded. 592 InterRAI assessments have been completed as part of the home support pilot. A draft evaluation of the pilot, produced by the Centre for Effective Services, has been completed.

Regarding oversight, the Department of Health is currently developing a regulatory framework for home-support providers with the aim of ensuring that all service-users are provided with high-quality care. This will comprise of (i) primary legislation for the licensing of home support providers, (ii) regulations for home support which will set out the minimum requirements that a provider must meet to obtain a licence, and (iii) HIQA national standards. The legislation and regulations will apply to home support providers including the community, voluntary and the private sector.

Primary Legislation is currently entering into final stages of the drafting process. It is intended to bring this legislation through the Houses of the Oireachtas at the earliest opportunity. This will ensure that all service users are provided with regulated, high quality home care.