Staffing a bigger issue than funding in dementia care, Oireachtas committee told

The health committee was told that regardless of how much money is given to the sector, it is impossible to provide a full staffing complement because the workers are not there

Staffing, not funding, is the biggest issue in terms of maximising support for sufferers of dementia an Oireachtas committee has heard.

The health committee was told on Wednesday morning that regardless of how much money is given to the sector, it is impossible to provide a full staffing complement because the workers are not there.

“If the Government put €100m on the table it wouldn’t solve the problem. There is no magic bullet for this,” John Dunne, chief executive of Family Carers Ireland said.

When asked what could be improved to rectify the staffing issue, Mr Dunne noted that pay is an issue in that all carers are paid equally regardless of the varying workloads of their roles.

He said that other countries have imported workers to alleviate the shortage of workers, with Germany hiring Vietnamese nationals and then training and employing them before they returned to their native country.

“But then you’re into, dare I say it, an issue of migration,” Mr Dunne said. “But where are these workers to come from?” he said.

Advocacy manager with the Alzheimer Society of Ireland Clodagh Whelan then noted that “as a society when we look at this work (caring), it is not valued”.

“It is highly skilled work but it is not valued in terms of pay, it’s not valued in terms of career progression,” she said.

The committee heard that within the next 20 years, the number of people living with dementia in Ireland is set to double. Roughly 64,000 people are currently living with the illness in Ireland.

Current plans in terms of the hiring of consultants have been “bogged down” by the HSE’s current recruitment embargo, Mr Dunne said.

However, he said that he also saw the hiring freeze as being an opportunity for the health service to better manage the resources it already has.

“While a very crude mechanism, the recruitment embargo is part of that process,” he said adding that it is equally important for the health service to review what it has and “see how we can make it more efficient”.

“That hasn’t been how our health service works and I think it should be,” he said.

Mr Dunne also expressed “serious concern” that the forthcoming referendum in March regarding the definition of care in the Constitution “could be lost and is there to be lost” due to a groundswell of discontent regarding its wording.

The Government has proposed that the wording of a new Article 42b of the Constitution would remove a specific reference to women providing care in the home and replace it with the wording that care in the home “gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision”.

Critics of the wording say it does not go far enough in its language, and that society should be seen to support carers, and not vice versa.

“The argument is that words like strive and endeavour have not delivered in the past and they won’t deliver now,” Mr Dunne said, adding that the “gaming that’s going on around the health budget at the moment isn’t helpful” in that regard.

“Carers are looking at this going into the referendum, and they’re seeing that words aren’t being matched by the actions, and that’s causing a lot of discontent on the ground,” he said.