SERIOUS FLAWS have been highlighted in the homecare package scheme for older people and people with disabilities.
A draft report from the National Economic and Social Forum found that the public had difficulty in finding out about homecare packages and how to get them.
It found huge differences in the operation of the scheme around the country and said little data was collected to assess if the scheme was working well or not.
Each homecare package is tailored to the person’s needs and could include home help, physiotherapy and occupational therapy services. About 11,000 people benefited from the scheme last year at a cost of €110 million.
The forum, a Government-appointed body that provides advice on economic and social policies, discussed its draft report at a seminar in Dublin yesterday. It will finalise the report in the coming weeks before presenting it to the Government.
Dr Anne Marie McGauran, the forum’s policy analyst, told the seminar that people had difficulty in finding out about the scheme.
One woman told the forum she made 18 calls in a 10-day period to find out about the package.
There were also huge differences in funding allocated with some local health offices providing as little as €70 per week and others paying more than €400.
People with homecare packages complained about a lack of co-ordination among the medical teams with some saying that two or three care workers arrived at the same time to work with them.
The report also highlighted duplication of work, where an older person could face double or triple assessments and could be means-tested several times for different services offered by the HSE.
Forum chairwoman Dr Maureen Gaffney said homecare packages were going to become a “huge” issue because the number of over-65s would have trebled in 50 years time.
“At the moment we have about four working-age people who support every older person. In 2026, there’s going to be about 2.6 people,” she said.
These older people were going to be “the best educated, most active, most aspirational with the highest expectations of any cohort of older people”, she said, and many of them would become carers.
“You are going to have a generation of people who seriously want their spouses and their parents to be cared for at home but who also want a life, who are not going to be happy to go into a purdah of caring.”
Dr Gaffney said the home care scheme had been very well planned but the implementation had not been so well thought out. There was a “complete fudge” on providing information on the scheme to the public in some areas.
“So at the very point in your life where your mother has suddenly fallen and broken her hip or there’s some sort of crisis . . . you’ve got to go through a rigmarole of finding out what is it that you are entitled to.”
She said there were “striking levels of mistrust” among the different groups providing home care. “This is the absolute enemy of good practice learning,” Dr Gaffney said.
The home care scheme is under evaluation by the Department of Health, and the Law Reform Commission is also looking at legal issues around home-based care.
