Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein)
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768. To ask the Minister for Health the number of nursing homes that had unannounced HIQA inspections after hours or on weekends in 2023 and to date in 2024. [42906/24]

Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail)
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I would like to thank the Deputy for his question.

The Chief Inspector of Social Care and the Health Information Quality Authority (HIQA) is the national independent regulator of designed centres for older people including public community nursing units and private nursing homes.

All these homes are subject to registration and inspection by HIQA, which is underpinned by a comprehensive quality framework comprising Registration Regulations, Care and Welfare Regulations and National Quality Standards.

HIQA continuously monitors centres through on-site inspections and reviews of information held.

Officials in my department contacted HIQA for this information and the following is their response:

"Announced and unannounced inspections

Inspections of nursing homes may be announced or unannounced.

Announced inspections are carried out to enable greater participation of residents and relatives in the inspection process by giving them four weeks’ notice of when inspectors would be present in the centre.

Inspectors may also carry out a short-term announced inspection if they require a particular person to be available during the inspection, such as a senior manager or someone representing the registered provider. In such situations, the announcement period may be reduced to 72 hours.

Unannounced inspections can happen at any time of the day or night, on any day of the week, without any advance notice to the registered provider.

The number of announced and unannounced inspections per year for 2023 and to date in 2024

Out-of-hours inspections.

Inspections normally occur between 8am and 4pm, or 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday, reflecting the contractual working hours of inspectors of social services.

If warranted, an inspection may commence earlier in the morning if there are concerns in relation to night-time staffing, or other issues impacting residents’ quality of life. Similarly, an inspection may commence in the evening if there are specific concerns, for example information that residents are required to go to bed too early, or residents are bored with insufficient activities of interest to them.

Please note: Start and finish times of inspections are included in all inspection reports, but are not routinely tracked. We have reviewed the recorded start and finish times of inspections, and the day of inspection, and compiled the information in the table below. Inspections that commenced before 8am are included, as are any inspections which occurred earlier than would have been expected. Likewise, inspections that started after 1pm are included along with any inspections which commenced later than when inspectors would normally have been expected to arrive in a nursing home.

This information should be read with caution as it was not gathered for the purpose of tracking out-of-hours inspections, but it is the nearest proxy that we have for such information.