Minister for Health Mary Harney said the Government “strongly refutes” the allegation by the Ombudsman that she or her department failed to cooperate with the investigation into nursing home provision.
The ombudsman’s report claims the State has deprived thousands of old people of their legal entitlement to nursing home care over four decades.
It found successive governments have repeatedly failed to amend the law to clarify entitlements to nursing home care forcing vulnerable elderly people to seek care in private homes, often at huge cost to themselves and families.
In a statement, Ms Harney said her Department had made it clear from the outset of the investigation, having consulted with the Attorney General, that that “it could not accept that a number of areas of the proposed investigation came within the ambit of the 1980 Ombudsman’s Act”.
The statement said a report on nursing home subventions published by the ombudsman in 2001 stated that the office’s jurisdiction “relates to administrative actions only and does not encompass all of the elements which make up the wider governmental process”.
“Similarly, the Ombudsman’s remit does not cover the conduct of litigation by the State,” the statement said.
“As is clear from the representations made to the Ombudsman and published today, the Minister has fundamental concerns about the way this investigation was undertaken and the failure to follow fair procedures, as well as the content, scope and language of the report. These issues will be considered carefully now that the final report has been published.”
She said the essential argument made in the report was that the statutory duties imposed on the HSE/health boards under the 1970 Health Act was that in-patient services were not subject to any resource limitation; that adequate resources had never been provided to honour these obligations; that the State had, therefore, been failing for decades to meet its obligations fully and that the Department and the HSE/health boards had tried to hide this “failure” and had acted in "a less than transparent and accountable way".
“The Government is not aware of any country in the world where health and personal social services are provided without some form of prioritisation which reflects the reality of resource limitations," she said.
"It is not credible to suggest that the Oireachtas, when it enacted the 1970 Act, intended and expected all services to be provided immediately once a clinical/social need for them had been established. The reality is that access to health services has always been determined by a combination of clinical and other professional judgements within an overall resource availability envelope.”
The Minister said the Government’s commitment to the improvement of services for older people had been “at the centre of health policy in recent years and will remain a priority into the future”.
She said the Fair Deal scheme ensured that those in need of long term nursing home care receive “an equal level of state support whether they are in a public or private nursing home”.
The HSE had received almost 16,500 applications for the Fair Deal scheme to date. “Of these, over 12,000 have been approved and the applications continue to be processed on a daily basis.”