Madam, - I write on behalf of the Irish Association of Social Workers to highlight the growing difficulties experienced by social workers and other health and social care professionals in attempting to support older persons in returning home from hospital.
The recent financial cutbacks by the Health Service Executive (HSE) are now resulting in many local areas having services to vulnerable older people severely curtailed. There are HSE administrative areas where the funding for home care packages has been cut to the point where no new packages are being allocated.
There are waiting lists in some areas for even the basic HSE services, such as home helps and home care attendants.
At the moment, many older people cannot go home from the hospital setting because they are unable to get the support they need to manage.
Despite a decade of the so-called "Celtic Tiger", there has been little real development of community services. We still have a type of discretionary provision of service which leads to budget cuts with little regard or concern for the hardship such actions cause older people and their carers. We remain a society where access to social care services is based on geography and pure pot luck.The Government's often repeated slogan that older people should live at home with dignity rings hollow in these circumstances.
The situation is worsening by the week, with more health board areas reporting difficulties with their budget for community services. The need for services is not going to go away, rather it is growing! As the HSE stops the funding, the applications for community services merely mount up, while the applicants wait in the most expensive part of the health service.
This waste of public resources negatively affects not only older people, but also all those waiting to access hospital services. Therefore, my association calls on the Government and the HSE to review their decisions to cut back these essential services and to reinstate them immediately. - Yours, etc,
JOHN BRENNAN,
Chairperson,
Irish Association of Social
Workers,
Pearse Street,
Dublin 2.