Tánaiste promises tough nursing home legislation

Tough legislation will ensure no-one will make money by exploiting older people living in private nursing homes, the Tánaiste warned today.

Minister for Health Mary Harney said robust legislation and an independent inspectorate will operate in a bid to ensure the atrocities of Leas Cross Nursing Home are not replicated.

“You can never be certain something like that won’t happen again but I am certain that we will have in place robust legislation and the national standards that will be enforced by an independent inspectorate,” she said.

The Tánaiste said the health services and society must learn from what was seen in Leas Cross.

“It was appalling what we saw there bed sores, total neglect, and that is not satisfactory. We have got to learn from that and we are learning from that,” she said.

“To be fair I think instances of abuse of that kind, or mismanagement, or inappropriate skill levels, are rare, hopefully.”

But Ms Harney told the SIPTU Conference on the Care of Older People this type of abuse should never happen again.

“Those that are prepared to exploit older people, vulnerable people, in order to make money for their nursing homes have to be penalised,” she said.

“It will not be satisfactory for anyone to seek to make money in the private nursing home setting out of exploiting older people and not providing the level and quality of care older persons require and deserve.”

Ms Harney said the period of consultation for legislation to establish the independent inspectorate has ended and it would be brought through the Oireachtas by this time next year.

“We will have a standard, we will have an inspectorate but the greatest guarantee of enforcing all that is the capacity to be able to close people down and that is what we will do,” she said.

SIPTU’s general secretary Joe O’Flynn said its members were concerned with the care offered to elderly people in nursing homes.

“I know this has become a real growth industry over the last decade,” he said.

“People with no knowledge or experience of providing nursing care have suddenly invested significant sums of money – encouraged no doubt by substantial tax-breaks and the prospect of considerable profit.”

Mr O’Flynn said the move to establish new standards for nursing homes was long overdue.

He also said the question of speedy access to services was absolutely critical to the future progress of the health service.

“The bottleneck at the front door of our hospitals is simply a reflection of deeper problems on the wards and the lack of provision of step-down and convalescent facilities,” he told the Dublin conference.

SIPTU highlighted a care model for older people involving adequately resourced home and community care.

Mr O’Flynn called for more resources to be allocated to community care, with a legal right to a home help, subventions and care services. The union said capital must be allocated immediately to start building the public nursing home places promised in the Health Strategy from 2001.

Ms Harney said there were 20,000 people over the age of 65 in residential care.

“About 78% of that number need not be in residential care, they have a low to medium level of dependency if we had had in place appropriate supports within a family or community level,” she said.

“Therefore the issue for us now is to try and ensure we support as many people remaining at home as long as possible.”