94-year-old woman was put on a three-year waiting list for home help

THE Health Service Executive (HSE) is failing to meet its home help targets for this year despite large-scale cutbacks already in place in the specialist service.

Figures from the HSE’s own Performance Monitoring Report (PMR) for January have shown in the first four weeks of the year 186 fewer elderly people received home help packages than had been planned and thousands more had their hours cut.

The HSE cut home help hours available in its most recent Service Plan from 1,019,883 hours in January 2008 to 998,300 hours during the same period this year.