Home service needs to be revised, claims Cork elderly advocate

AN advocate for the elderly in Cork has called for the HSE’s Home Service to be revised, claiming that limitations on the current scheme are “not acceptable”.

Speaking to The Echo Paddy O’Brien said Health Care Assistants (HCSA), formerly known as ‘Home Helps’, previously carried out a far wider range of tasks but claimed that the scope of the scheme has now been refined to “personal care only”.

“The original home scheme was a great scheme, approximately 40 years ago… a home help did everything.

“They’d come into the house in the morning.

“First of all, they’d have time for a chat, which doesn’t exist now.

“The home help would go into the house, have the chat, make a light breakfast, if it was wintertime light the fire, tidy the home, dress the bed, go to the shop and get a few messages,” he said.

Another service HCSAs performed for clients who wished to attend Mass was dropping them to their local church, he said. “That now is banned,” Mr O’Brien claimed.

He stressed that HCSAs “do great work” but are limited in the tasks they can carry out under the current iteration of the scheme, which he described as “not acceptable”.

Mr O’Brien, claimed to have encountered instances of people being refused a HCSA if they do not require assistance with personal care.

One worker, who has been working as a HCSA for over 25 years, told The Echo they had seen a change in the scheme over the years.

“It’s all personal care. We were told we’re not to do any housework.

“Now, if we go into someone and they have a fire, we are allowed to light the fire but we’re not allowed to bring in buckets of coal, but to be honest we do because the person would need the coal in the room,” they said.

Giving an example of what a visit might look like, they said:

“If we’re going into someone in the morning, we do make them a breakfast, we’d give them a shower maybe and make the bed and just make sure that there’s nothing on the ground that they’d trip over, get them dressed.

The HCSA said they have been told on “numerous” occasions, that their role is not to clean a client’s house.

“They said if the person needs the house cleaned, we’re not to do it, they’re to go away and hire a cleaner,” they said.

A Cork Kerry Community Healthcare (CKCH) spokesperson said the “type and quantity of provided is determined by the client’s assessed care needs, which are clinically assessed by the HSE”.

“The nursing care plan outlines the needs of the client and it is this which determines what service “each client receives within the limits of the staff resources available.

“A wide range of tasks are carried out by our Health Care Assistants as determined by the client’s care plan, including; assistance with personal care tasks (getting in and out of bed, showering, shaving), cleaning out and lighting of fire to ensure an adequately warm environment, cleaning of a client’s personal space where non-performance of such duties impacts on the health, safety and well-being of the individual, reminding clients to take their medication etc.”

They added that, in the current environment, there is “significant ongoing demand for Home around personal care needs in all areas and available staff resources are deployed to provide this essential to as many clients as possible”.