Written answer
Departmental Data
1292. Deputy Róisín Shortall asked the Minister for Health to provide an update on implementation of each of the recommendations from the Report of the Strategic Workforce Advisory Group on Home Carers and Nursing Home Health Care Assistants, in tabular form. [45281/24]
Comment on this
The cross-departmental Strategic Workforce Advisory Group was established in March 2022. The Group was charged with examining strategic workforce challenges in publicly and privately provided front-line carer roles in home support and nursing homes and with making recommendations to address these.
The Group, which was chaired by the Department of Health, comprised representatives from seven government departments (Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth; Enterprise, Trade and Employment; Health; Higher and Further Education, Research, Innovation and Science; Justice; Public Expenditure and Reform; and Social Protection), the Health Service Executive (HSE), the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) and SOLAS.
Providing an overview of the work of the Group and its key findings, the Report of the Strategic Workforce Advisory Group on Home Carers and Nursing Home Health Care Assistants, which was published in October 2022, presented a suite of 16 recommendations spanning the areas of areas of recruitment, pay and conditions of employment, barriers to employment, training and professional development and sectoral reform.
Implementation of the 16 recommendations is underway, led by a cross-departmental group, chaired by the Department of Health. Significant reform has been delivered. A new HSE home support tender has been in place since August 2023. 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 the new revised rates of funding.
The group met in July 2024 and the most recent implementation updates can be found on the following link www.gov.ie/pdf/?file=https://assets.gov.ie/304859/056ead0a-00a1-4aee-a95e-aa23ca79fe29.pdf#page=null .