Nursing home checks delayed until next year
The head inspector with the state’s new health standards watchdog admitted insufficient staff numbers meant it would be late summer next year before residential centres for the elderly were checked.
Chief inspector Michele Clarke, with the newly established Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA), said complaints in the meantime were being referred back to the Health Service Executive.
“It will be next summer, we hope, if we get the staff in. We have to have the staff.”
Concerns handed to HIQA already included problems at nursing homes, disability centres and residential care units. Ms Clarke said the authority would be keeping a watching brief on HSE inquiries before its inspection teams begin work in late 2008.
The HIQA chief was speaking at a Dublin conference on elderly abuse organised by support group Reach Out.
Organiser Jack Kearney said the group had received complaints from carers who reported abuses to management and then claimed they were victimised. Other complaints included elderly patients being left in chairs from morning until night, force feeding and overmedication.
“Many victims of elder abuse are totally unaware of the fact that they are being abused, such is the nature of their condition. Many more are isolated and kept in appalling conditions by unscrupulous families and carers,” claimed Mr Kearney.
Lecturer Dr Clodagh O’Dwyer, in geriatrics at Trinity College Dublin, noted a case where an elderly mother had appeared with shortness of breath and cardiac problems at Tallaght Hospital. It only emerged after a social worker intervened, that the 83-year-old’s son, who had mental difficulties, was abusing her.
She said that according to ratios established in Europe and the US, between 2% and 10% of elderly people were experiencing abuse. This meant at the very least at any one time, between 12,000 and 20,000 elderly people were being abused in Ireland, she said.
Improved services could include counselling for spousal abuse and reducing carer stress, Dr O’Dwyer added.
