Regional imbalance ‘worsening’ in long-term care sector - Harkin

A DAMNING report by the ESRI on the provision of long-term residential care (LTRC) in Ireland has identified regional inequalities in care home bed availability with counties like Sligo, Leitrim and Donegal worst hit. Furthermore, the report states that, based on future planned development, these inequalities are likely to be exacerbated in the near term.

Commenting on the report, Deputy Marian Harkin said: “I have been raising this issue consistently over the last number of years in the Dáil asking the Government and Minister Butler to intervene to secure sufficient long term care capacity in the north-west region, in particular, and in other more rural counties. So far no action has been taken to improve the supply of long term care beds in the regions and the trend is going in the wrong direction.

“Counties like Leitrim, Sligo, Donegal, Mayo and Roscommon have the oldest population,” Ms Harkin pointed out. “In Leitrim people over 65 years of age account for 19.3% of the population while the figure is 18.8% in Sligo, whereas in counties like Dublin and Kildare this age-cohort accounts for 14% and 12.3% respectively. Yet, the bed numbers available for long term care per 1,000 of population in, for example, Dublin and Kildare are between 30% and 60% higher than in Sligo and Donegal. This situation needs to be urgently addressed as, right now, county Sligo needs 90 extra beds just to reach the national average, with Leitrim needing 26 and Donegal needing 204.

“There is a continuing trend of smaller family owned and operated LTRC homes across all regions closing while larger operators tend to open facilities in large towns and cities, particularly in the east and midlands,” the Deputy explained. “This could have a devastating effect on elderly people loving in areas like the northwest who sometimes have to move to care homes far away from family, friends, neighbours, their local GP and pharmacist and from the community where they have lived most of their lives.

Ms Harkin goes on to say that a complete overhaul of the Fair Deal Scheme is needed from a number of different perspectives, “First of all it needs to be reformed from a regional perspective. It is far from fair when the average payment per week per resident in Dublin is nearly 40% higher than in Leitrim and 50% higher than in Donegal. There is also a massive difference between payments to public nursing homes and private nursing homes across the country with many public nursing homes getting up to 100% more support than private nursing homes across a range of counties.

“We urgently need to adopt a new assessment tool for payments to nursing homes, which takes into consideration the needs of residents and the level of services provided. The current model is accelerating the closure of the more rural, voluntary and family run nursing homes and creating another East-West divide,” Deputy Harkin concluded.