Carers call for an end to unequal access to home care

The new alliance spans voluntary and private care providers as well as family carers. Stock picture

The unequal access to homecare based on where you live needs to end, an alliance of family carers and voluntary and private providers has urged.

A report, published yesterday by the Home Care Providers Alliance, highlighted a critical shortage of carers and said access to care depends on an “arbitrary Eircode lottery”.

Fiacre Hensey, representing not-for-profit National Community Care Network (NCCN), said they have 1,000 carer vacancies and are especially struggling to recruit in rural areas such as west Clare and across the Midlands.

The NCCN has 20 companies, and he said vacancies run across the country.

“I’m based in Co Clare, and you would always have black spots, places that are far from Ennis or Shannon so to recruit in those areas has become quite difficult,” Mr Hensey said after the report’s launch.

“The real difficulty is you have potential clients in fairly rural areas and how do you now get a carer to go to those clients? Most of our members would pay some sort of travel pay but what is not covered is the time.”

Jim Daly, chair of Home and Community Care Ireland and former minister for mental health and older people, said the challenges are the same for voluntary and professional carers.

“Terms and conditions have often been bandied about, but there are a number of issues behind that,” said Mr Daly. 

The biggest dysfunction in the current system is that the HSE is the regulator, competitor [and] adjudicator. 

He welcomed moves towards a statutory homecare scheme which will support families in the way the Fair Deal does for nursing homes.

“There is a critical shortage of staff at the moment, staffing is the key,” he said.

The report urges changes in social welfare rules around part-time work, changes in work permit rules, and to how companies are paid which, they say, would allow for better terms and conditions for staff.

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“Clients and their families should be entitled to reasonable flexibility in the way that their allocated home support funding is used in practice, provided that the funding is spent with licensed providers and includes core minimum components of care,” the report states.

Fine Gael health spokesman Colm Burke hosted a meeting between the alliance and TDs and senators yesterday, and said: “There is an absence of regulatory framework.”