Public nursing home bed costs €700 more than private sector

The cost of accommodating a patient in a publicly-run nursing home is up to €700 per week higher than in a private facility, official figures due out soon will reveal.

The cost of providing care in a public long-stay residential centre at present ranges from €884 to €2,089 per week.

The approved rate for private nursing homes operating under the Government’s Fair Deal scheme runs from €685 to €1,325 per week.

In the public system, the most expensive long-stay facilities are Cherry Orchard Hospital in Ballyfermot in Dublin where the cost of care is €2,089 per week and at the Meath Community Unit on Heytesbury Street, Dublin, where the cost is €2,073 per week.

A HSE report to be published this week is expected to acknowledge that it costs significantly more to operate a long-stay facility in the public service than in the private sector. The report will point to higher nurse staffing ratios, better terms and conditions for staff, the types of buildings used and geographical locations of services as among the reasons for the higher costs.

Residential services

The report is expected to maintain that the cost of providing long-term residential services is, in the main, made up of staff costs at public service rates of pay.

There are about 4,900 people currently accommodated in 112 publicly-run long-stay facilities across the country.

However, the HSE has for the past five years declined to publish details of the costs of running these facilities, a move which has been strongly criticised by private sector nursing home operators.

The figures for each publicly-run centre will be set out in the HSE report.

The HSE said that in relation to centres with high cost of care, it was “identifying the cost drivers be they pay or non-pay and in relation to the overall specific resident’s requirements for care, which is seeing different levels of staffing and skill-mix in evidence across some centres”.

The Department of Health is understood to be preparing to commission a value-for-money review of the Fair Deal scheme next year.