Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent)
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184. To ask the Minister for Health if she will urgently address the lack of home help services where people are approved but there is no services available; the efforts being made to improve the recruitment of home helps; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [23185/25]

Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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Supporting Older People as they age and improving access to the home support services is a key priority for the Government and is an area where significant investment has been made to support the delivery of this service. Since budget 2020 the funding of this service has increased from €487m to circa €838 million in budget 2025 which represents an increase of over 70% over the last 5 years.

While there has been a significant funding increase in home support services over the last number of years, it is acknowledged that Waiting lists for home support have been a persistent issue with staff recruitment presenting a significant challenge in this area. The latest available preliminary activity reflects the period up to 31st of March 2025 Year to Date. Nationally, the waiting list for home support has reduced to 4,888 people with 2,195 people on this list waiting for a new package, 2,693 people waiting for additional home support hours, and no one waiting for funding approval. The current waiting list has reduced by approximately 15% since the same period last year.

Addressing the challenges related to staff recruitment for home care provision has been an area of focus for the Department of Health. To review the challenges associated with home support recruitment the Department of Health established a cross-departmental Strategic Workforce Advisory Group (SWAG) in March 2022. This group set out to examine the challenges in front-line carer roles in the home support and long-term residential care sectors and identified 16 recommendations to address these challenges. The implementation of many of these recommendation is currently underway; with many significant reforms having been implemented to date.

One of the SWAG recommendations which has been implemented is the development of a new and improved HSE Home Support Authorisation Scheme (tender) which has been in place since August 2023, for payments to approved private and voluntary providers to deliver home support on behalf of the HSE. This delivers on commitments for sectoral reform such as payment for travel time for home support providers, paying carers the National Living Wage at a minimum, and bringing legacy rates in line with revised rates of funding. This reform has had a significant impact on improving staff pay and conditions for Home support workers and has also been an important measure to reduce potential disincentives to delivering rural based home care due to the improved payment to homecare workers for travel time which can be substantially higher in rural areas.

Another initiative implemented to increase the capacity of home support workers within the Irish Home care sector was to issue a number of employment permits specifically for the role of Care workers and home care workers. These employment permits were initially authorised in 2022. To date 2,500 work permits have been issued through this initiative.

Work is continuing to improve the delivery of this service nationally with the Department of Health and HSE working constructively together to find solutions to the current recruitment challenges being faced in this sector.