Mr Patsy McGlone (Mid Ulster): To ask the Minister of Health, pursuant to AQW 30201/22-27, to detail any steps he is taking to reduce the number of people still waiting for all or part of their domiciliary care packages.
Minister of Health: With a growing ageing population, the demand for older people’s social care services has increased significantly. Social Services do work with individuals and their family/carer to explore all options around family/informal/community and voluntary supports available before exploring the need for domiciliary care services.
My Department, last year provided a small amount of money to each of the five Trusts to implement the ‘Early Review Team’ with the aim of reviewing new or increased packages of care at an early stage to ensure individuals have the correct package of care to meet their needs and to ensure some of the capacity can be redirected to other individuals assessed as requiring a domiciliary care package. The early review is targeted at the over 65 population. This concept has proved quite successful in that some domiciliary care hours have been recycled to those most in need and has helped reduce waiting lists for domiciliary care. Currently my department is scoping out requirements and costings to extend the early review concept to cover all other adult programmes of care.
The HSC trusts are working to review domiciliary care staff rotas and runs to maximize capacity.
The Social Care Collaborative Forum and the Fair Work Forum are maintaining a focus on home care across the region. There is recognition of the vital work home care workers provide and the need to improve renumeration and career pathways within home care, in order to attract more people into this career. This will inevitably improve capacity and reduce unmet need.
ENDS
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