The State has deprived thousands of old people of their legal entitlement to nursing home care over four decades, a new report by the Ombudsman published today claims.
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, it found.
The report - entitled Who Cares?- An investigation into the right to nursing home care in Ireland - concludes that access to nursing home care over four decades has been marked by "confusion, uncertainty, misinformation, inconsistency and inequity".
It says the State has “failed consistently” to meet its obligation to provide nursing home care over this period and, as a result, now faces several hundred legal actions from people seeking compensation for costs incurred in availing of private nursing home care.
The Ombudsman recommends that the Department of Health and the HSE formally acknowledge the State has not been meeting its obligations under section 52 of the Health Act 2010.
The report does not recommend a redress scheme because the financial consequences for the State “would be enormous, potentially running to several billion euro”.
Instead, it asks the Government to consider setting up some limited scheme to assist those families who have suffered serious financial hardship.
However, the Government has so far refused to admit liability in more than 300 legal cases taken by, or on behalf of, people who were unable to receive nursing home care from the State because no public beds were available.
The report says the Department of Health settled a dozen cases before they proceeded to a court hearing and paid “some level of payment to the plaintiffs”.
The Government has already admitted it illegally charged tens of thousands of older people who held medical cards while receiving public care in nursing homes up until 2004. As a result, Minister for Health Mary Harney set up a redress scheme in 2006, which attracted 35,000 applications and has cost approximately €450 million in compensation payments.
The Ombudsman's report does not indicate how many people could be eligible for compensation but it notes the number of beds in private homes has increased from 6,932 in 1997 to 20,526 in 2009. The number of public beds has fallen from 13,594 in 1968 to 8,250 last year, it says.
“Very many people had no option other than to avail of private care and, in doing so, fared badly in financial terms by comparison with those who succeeded in getting a place in a public nursing home,” says the report.
It pinpoints wide regional disparities in the grants and subventions paid by the State to residents in private care homes. It also concludes there has been an absence of any consistent approach to the allocation of care places and the management of waiting lists.
In one case the Ombudsman uncovered an eight-year delay on the part of the HSE processing an application for a public nursing home bed. Many people were forced to remain in acute hospitals for long periods while awaiting placement in long stay care, it says.
The State’s failure to amend the law over several decades to bring practice into harmony with its legal obligation reflected a “wider failure in government”, the report claims.