Dear All,
You may have seen in the media last week the new campaign launched by Nursing Homes Ireland called “It’s Not Fair – Save our Nursing Homes” which highlights the urgent need to fix Fair Deal pricing.
In 2009, the Fair Deal Scheme was introduced by Government to support people needing long term residential care by combining personal contributions with State funding. It is now 15 years on and the review of the Fair Deal scheme commenced in 2021 and due for publication in 2023 remains not completed and now expected in Q1 2025.
Since 2018, 77 nursing homes have closed across the country, leading to the loss of over 2,800 beds in local communities throughout Ireland. Fair Deal pricing needs to be fixed in order to avoid further closures in the future.
Our costs in the nursing home sector are continually rising and the increases available from the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) have not and are not keeping pace with the cost increases.
A key failure of the current Fair Deal scheme is the massive difference paid by the NTPF for private nursing homes versus HSE/Public nursing homes – on average, this amounts to a difference per resident per week of €650 per week, a staggering €33,800 per resident per year.
Coupled with this is the challenge every nursing home including ours face, in that we recruit, train and develop our staff and in a number of cases, we then lose our skilled and committed staff to the public sector as the public sector can afford to pay higher rates than the private sector due to the difference in the funding received.
A serious challenge many of our residents directly face is in accessing essential primary care services (including equipment like mattresses, chairs etc) that they would more readily be able to access if they lived at home – our residents should not be discriminated against simply because of where they live and we fight this case for our residents on an ongoing basis.
A key part of the Curam Care Homes ethos is to provide homes for our residents close to where people have lived all of their lives and that our homes would be part of the neighbourhood and community that there are located in. With the closure of these 77 homes, many residents have had to move to nursing homes away from the areas where they have lived with in many cases families under pressure to visit as regularly as they would like.
What can we do – at Curam Care Homes, we continue to raise this message at local and national levels to support this need for change.
What can you (our staff, our residents, our families) do – you will see posters about this campaign throughout the home and posts on social media. We would ask you to lend your support by sharing the campaign on social media and at whatever opportunity might arise, raising this message with your local TDs and help us to protect the futures of not only our own current residents, but those around the country in all homes and indeed those who are not residents now but may be in the future.
We thank you for your support.
James and Seamus