Another ‘two to three years’ for home care regulations

It will take “two to three years” before home care is regulated to protect vulnerable older people, an official from the Department of Health said yesterday.

The assistant secretary of the department’s social care division, Frances Spillane, said they were at an early stage in developing policy proposals to extend the Fair Deal scheme to home care.

Ms Spillane told a meeting of the joint Oireachtas committee on health that an older people’s project unit had been established in the department and, hopefully, it would help them to move “a bit more quickly”.