Nursing home care needs ‘reboot’

PRIVATE operators have built ‘barracklike’ nursing homes for profit, due to a vacuum in Government policy, it has been claimed.

Professor Des O’Neill, chair of the Irish Society of Physicians in Geriatric Medicine (ISPGM), said an ‘absolute reboot’ of nursing home care is required. He was speaking following the publication of an Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) report, which found one in five small private nursing homes in rural areas shut in a two-year period, with a loss of almost 700 public nursing home beds between February 2020 and December 2022.

The report warned there is now a growing reliance on large, for-profit operators, ‘driven by recent entrants into the Irish market who are mainly financed by international private equity’. These operators opened several private homes recently, the ESRI said, which had over 150 beds in each. Prof. O’Neill said: ‘This shows a massive vacuum of policies in the Department of Health, who’ve ignored this area for a long time. Instead of creating a framework of what we should have in nursing homes, into this vacuum have come large, private operators making huge barrack-like institutions of hundreds of beds.’ He welcomed the production by the department of a document on nursing home design, saying in future these facilities should have no more than 72 beds, in six domestically scaled units.

Dr Jerry Cowley, GP and chair of St Brendan’s nursing home in Mulranny, Co. Mayo, said small rural nursing homes were struggling to survive.

Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane said the ESRI’s findings must be a wake-up call for the Government.

Minister for Mental Health and Older People Mary Butler said the ESRI report had highlighted the challenges facing the sector, and that the Government was continuing to work on short-term stability and long-term growth.