Subsidies offered by the Government to elderly people fit and willing to move from acute hospital beds to beds in private nursing homes are grossly inadequate, it has been claimed.
Amid the ongoing crisis in accident and emergency departments, Age Action Ireland said yesterday that while individuals could qualify for subvention payments of up to €680 a week, the reality was that only "a very small minority" were receiving this level of payment.
Mr Paul Murray, head of communications at Age Action Ireland, said that with private nursing homes costing up to €1,000 a week, very few could afford to make up the difference between the grant they might get and the cost of a nursing home bed.
"While the Government is spending over €115 million on subsidies, it is quite clearly grossly inadequate," he said.
His comments came amid continuing concerns that up to 400 mainly elderly people are occupying acute hospital beds in the eastern region because they have nowhere to be discharged to. If they were moved to available nursing home beds, it would cost the State a fraction of what it was costing to keep them in hospital beds.
Mr Murray added that fewer than half the nursing home beds in the State were public and they were difficult to access. "Some people are hanging on in hospital as long as they can to get a public bed," he said.
Furthermore, Mr Murray said, about 16 per cent of those who go into nursing homes had low-dependency needs and if community supports such as home-help services were adequately funded, many of these could remain in their own homes which was what they really wanted anyway. This would also be more cost-effective for the State, he said.
The occupation of hospital beds by people medically fit for discharge has been one of the factors cited as contributing to the current A&E crisis in the eastern region in particular, where patients every day are backed up on trolleys in A&E departments because of a shortage of beds.
The Irish Nurses' Organisation claimed yesterday there were 136 patients on trolleys in A&E units across the State, an improvement on the previous day when there were more than 200 patients on trolleys waiting for beds. A number of hospitals, however, claimed the INO figures were inaccurate and making the situation look worse than it was.