Legislation will be introduced next year to protect elderly people living in nursing homes from exploitation, the Tánaiste said today.
Mary Harney
Speaking at a Siptu forum on the care of older people, Mary Harney promised an independent inspectorate to enforce national standards, and "robust" legislation to guard against a repeat of the Leas Cross scandal in north Dublin.
"You can never be certain something like that won't happen again, but I am certain that we will have in place robust legislation and the national standards that will be enforced by an independent inspectorate," she said.
The Leas Cross incident caused outrage throughout the State. Ms Harney said that although such incidents were hopefully rare, lessons needed to be learned from the incident.
"It was appalling what we saw there bed sores, total neglect, and that is not satisfactory," she said.
"We have got to learn from that and we are learning from that. To be fair I think instances of abuse of that kind, or mismanagement, or inappropriate skill levels, are rare hopefully."
However, she emphasised that such incidents should not be allowed to occur again, and that those who tried to exploit older people and failed to provide adequate care would by penalised.
"It will not be satisfactory for anyone to seek to make money in the private nursing home setting out of exploiting older people and not providing the level and quality of care older persons require and deserve," she told the forum.
Legislation required to establish the inspectorate should be brought before the Oireachtas next year.
Also speaking at the forum, Siptu's general secretary, Joe O'Flynn, described the Government's plans to enforce new standards as long overdue. He expressed his members' concern over the level of care offered by nursing homes to elderly patients.
"I know this has become a real growth industry over the last decade - people with no knowledge or experience of providing nursing care have suddenly invested significant sums of money -encouraged no doubt by substantial tax-breaks and the prospect of considerable profit," he said.
