Elderly people worse off due to underspend in cost of subvention
The Irish Nursing Homes Organisation requires answers as to why the Department of Health and Children last year underspent by €31 million on the cost of subvention for nursing home residents.
The Comptroller and Auditor General’s report for 2005 confirms that subvention payments for that year totalled €109.8m, when the Department of Health budgeted for a spend of €140m.
This underspend must be viewed in the context that the current budget is insufficient to meet the demand for subvention.
The failure of the Government to radically reform the subvention scheme for persons in long-term residential care is extremely disappointing, and is causing serious distress for many elderly people and their families all over the country.
The report also highlighted the lack of clear rules about who is entitled to get enhanced payments and the practice of each HSE area assessing its own case.
This reinforces the position held by the INHO for a number of years that the current system for allocating enhanced subvention is inequitable and arbitrary.
The e31m left unspent could have gone a long way towards reducing the inequity in the subvention system whereby applicants and residents with the same level of need and resources are being treated differently in different HSE regions.
It is essential that, once the need for long-term care is established, access to public funding in either public, long-stay facilities or private nursing homes should be based on common assessment of income and wealth. This would end the current anomaly whereby a person applying for a subvention to a private nursing home is subject to a much more rigorous assessment than a person seeking admission to a bed in a public nursing home.
Tadhg Daly
Chief Executive Officer
Irish Nursing Homes Organisation
Centre Point Business Park
Oak Road
Dublin 12
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