Never one to miss the opportunity to capitalise on Government blushes, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has called for a less commercial (ie, private sector) approach to caring for our elderly
It’s a sentiment any family would share and an easy point to make in the aftermath of last week’s RTÉ Investigates programme on abuse and neglect of elderly nursing home residents.
However, divorced from the financial realities such an approach entails – financial realities that everyone in national politics is fully aware of – it is little more than a cheap populist stunt.
No more or less than the health sector in general, nursing homes work under a two-tier structure. There is a modest network of public nursing homes and a far bigger and growing private nursing home sector.
Accepting the fact that very few people will have the capacity to pay up to €8,000 a month for their own care or that of their loved ones, the State partly funds the private sector through Fair Deal. The alternative is to invest in tens of thousands of additional public nursing home beds, but there is no political appetite for that.
What the State pays per bed per week under Fair Deal is a fraction of the State-funded cost per bed in public nursing homes. In other words, the State pays private nursing homes substantially less per bed than it pays for the same bed in a public nursing home.
Upwards of three-quarters of all long-term residents in private nursing homes are funded by the Fair Deal.
That inevitably means that private nursing homes must operate on far lower costs per bed. And that’s even before you consider that private sector business, by definition, operates on a for-profit basis.
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Everyone will rightly be horrified at the abuse and neglect captured by the RTÉ Investigates team in two homes run by the State’s largest single private sector provider, Emeis/Orpea.
But equally, no one with any experience of nursing homes in the Republic would have great confidence that such incidents are isolated to those nursing homes or that company.
Politicians, on the Government side and in Opposition, can engage in cheap soundbites, but for those in nursing homes and their families, honest engagement on how the State can help meet the real cost of eldercare would be far more welcome.
