Home help staffing crisis
Deputy Conway-Walsh argues outsourcing and privatisation have hollowed out home help services and made staffing unstable. Minister Butler rejects that description, points to current home care delivery levels and funding, and says thousands remain waiting or partially covered because carers cannot be recruited.
There were 12,000 home help workers employed directly by the HSE in 2008, and now there are just over 5,000. I am glad that Minister of State, Deputy Butler, is here. The system is broken in many ways. What true evaluation has been done of the impact of the policy of outsourcing and privatisation? We can do all of the advertising in the world, but the system is now broken to an extent that we will not attract the workers we need. Current workers are going from Billy to Jack and do not know what they are doing from one week to the next. We have to re-examine the system and go back to what was being done in 2008, when we had a system that met people's needs. I know of elderly people in Mayo who are being put to bed at 5.30 p.m. on a summer's evening because they have to fit in with the system that is broken.
Comment on this
The system is far from broken. Today, as we stand here in Leinster House 56,000 people have received home care and will receive it at lunchtime and in the evening. We are challenged in areas where we do not have staff. I had a budget of €723 million this year, a phenomenal amount of money, to deliver home care. We are challenged from the perspective that approximately 3,000 people are waiting for home care. They are funded, but we cannot get the carers.
The second issue is that about 3,200 people have a partial package. They may not get supports at weekend. I put in place a strategic workforce advisory group last year to examine how we could make these changes. I worked closely with the former Minister of State, Deputy Damien English, on making sure that we could introduce permits for those who are living outside of the EU. To date, of the permits issued on 1 January, 68 have issued. We are also running a rolling recruitment campaign across all nine CHOs. The main reason why more private capacity is being used is because we have increased the level of home care to people by over 3 million hours since the Government came into office. When there is more demand, we have to go to where there is someone to provide the supports.