“Entire “for profit” model of care has failed our elderly,” says Bríd Smith TD
Calls for move to public provision of elderly care in the future
People Before Profit TD Bríd Smith has welcomed many of the recommendations of the expert panel report on nursing homes, but warned that while the report highlights key issues it skirts around the “elephant in the room” which remains the fact that 80% of our long term nursing home beds are in private, for profit, facilities.
The TD said that much of the recent disaster in elderly care during the covid crisis can be directly linked to failures of that model, a model she said had been incentivized by successive Governments.
She said: “Many of the recommendations which I welcome in this report are necessary because we have shifted elderly care to the private sector. Effectively we have contracted out the care of the most vulnerable to for profit companies. The problems with staffing levels, pay and retention and the qualifications are all made worse in a system driven by profit making over care needs of the elderly.”
The TD said that as well as the measures recommended immediately for dealing with any potential second wave, there was a need to acknowledge that this system had to be changed to one run by public institutions with oversight and control in areas of staffing levels, pay and qualifications.
She said: “Talking about governance and oversight is still evading the central issue, we need to bring private nursing homes into the public system and increase the public provision of elderly care.”
The TD is also calling for a public inquiry into all deaths in nursing homes during the covid crisis: “,We need to see what level of care our elderly had during this crisis and whether the clinical decision being made, for example not to send vulnerable residents to acute hospital settings, were made by the right people for the right reasons, anything less than a full inquiry is an insult to the memories of those who passed from Covid and their loved ones.”
