The growing use by the HSE of private for profit for services in the area of intellectual disability is negatively impacting staff, undermining quality and shortchanging one of the most vulnerable groups in the country, a Siptu conference has heard.
Seán Ryan, a Clare-based care assistant working with the Brothers of Charity for almost 17 years, told the union’s biennial conference in Galway on Tuesday of a group of private companies working in the area of intellectual disability whose revenues from the HSE had increased seven-fold in just three years.
Their success, he suggested, was based on low pay and poor conditions with staff turnover inevitably impacting on those the services were intended to help but “when you tender on the basis of cheap and churn then it seems you will be successful in winning contracts”.
“Good services,” he said, “are also at risk of harm when there is a shift to cut corners, to increase profit and the result is poor outcomes for those vulnerable individuals who receive the services.”
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He said that for some of the companies now involved in the sector, “it’s a business first and foremost, with the quality of service and the quality of the lives of the individuals who receive those services coming, in some cases, a very distant second.”
The firms are entering a sector long dominated by voluntary organisations like the Brothers of Charity, which employs 5,400 people across 10 counties.
Staff in these quickly growing operations suffer, he said, by comparison with those, like him, working for Section 38 voluntary organisations with terms and conditions linked to those of public service employees. In many of the private sector firms, he said, pay was low, sometimes minimum wage, and there were fewer premiums for the likes of working Sundays or nights.
“They pay the least amount, or as close as possible to minimum, keep the workers on that year after year and only move begrudgingly up because the national minimum wage rates rise,” he said.
Speaking to The Irish Times, he said the upshot was inevitable with huge turnover of staff because so many workers left as soon as they realised they could do significantly better working for a longer-established service provider.
“Typically, people will stay six months in one of these companies because they become disillusioned.” If they don’t leave, he said, they can be up to 40 per cent financially worse off over the course of their career.
“It’s not that they’re not caring people but the reality is that people leaving hits the people they have been working with because once they are there even for a few months, a bond has been established but suddenly there is a new person in the role.”
He said the issue was undermining many of the other ways in which services were improving due to increased regulation and greater consultation with those using the services.
“We’ve gone from the model years ago, where should we would take six people and cram them into a house and maybe teach them a craft to asking them what sort of lives they want to live, whether they want to work and if they can, trying to facilitate that and support the other ways in which they engage with the wider community.”
“Because you used to have a situation where people would have done pottery, or whatever, for 30 years and when you’d ask them, they’d tell you they always hated it. Now, they are getting a say in what they do. And rightly so. But you have to resource all of that,” he said.
The motion, on opposing the privatisation of intellectual disability services, was passed unanimously.
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