Ireland is seven days into the General Election campaign. At HCCI, we want to make it clear to members of the public which candidates have a good record of supporting home care. And so, over the next two weeks, HCCI will be announcing the candidates we are endorsing for the General Election.
We have chosen a candidate for endorsement based on their track record of supporting home care and care in the community, and their promise to continue doing so. Those we endorse are people who understand the sector well, support independent providers (private for profit and private not for profit organisations) and have engaged with HCCI during the lifetime of the current Government.
We’ve asked each candidate we plan to endorse to sign onto the Home Care Promise, a set of three principles HCCI view as crucial to advancing home and community care in the next Dáil. These principles are:
- Access: Implement the Statutory Home Support Scheme to improve access and give a legal entitlement to care.
- Expand: the number of home care hours and workers.
- Housing: Develop a standalone housing policy for older people.
We want to see Access improved across the board. That means a dedicated Home Care Waiting List Taskforce to sort the issues that particularly affect rural Ireland; it also means finally legislating to license and regulate providers, and to give people a legal entitlement to home care. Only this step will embed community care properly into our health and social care continuum.
Too many older people and people with disabilities enter residential care prematurely because it’s easier to access nursing homes than it is home care. We need nursing homes as part of our mix of care options in the community but we also need a form of Fair Deal for Home Care. The lack of a statutory right to home care has for too long been promised and not delivered.
We also need to Expand home care hours and the number of workers employed in the sector. A commitment to multi-annual funding will help the sector plan the delivery of more hours but we also need a workforce strategy to fully realise the promise to honour and value our home care workers properly.
Every day, more than 55,000 older people receive home care and we expect to deliver nearly 6 million more hours of care in 2024 than we did in 2020. During the lifetime of this Government, we have made strides into reforming terms and conditions for home care workers, though there is more to do.
A problem area for home care in general are waiting lists, which affect rural Ireland more than anywhere else. More than 5,500 people are waiting for home care, most of them in rural areas.
As we all know, Housing is a crucial issue in this campaign and we need a standalone housing policy for older people. Work on this was started in 2019 but has been left to gather dust on a shelf during the most acute housing crises we have ever experienced in this country. This needs to change if we are to solve the current housing malaise.
Over the course of the campaign, we will be highlighting a range of issues extending from housing options for older people, disabilities home care and reform to the workforce. Their absence in this announcement speaks only to the need to give due prominence and consideration to them in their own right, which we will do in due course.
We are taking this message to the country through the Home Care Canvass alongside some of the candidates we have endorsed. We very much hope to see you, to engage with you and to speak directly about your experiences of home and community care. The conversation starts now!
Yours sincerely,
Joseph Musgrave, CEO HCCI
