Bríd Smith demands public inquiry into COVID nursing home deaths

I want to start by giving our condolences from People Before Profit deputies in this House to all who lost loved ones during the pandemic, but particularly those who lost loved ones in these care home settings. I want to thank Sinn Fein for bringing the motion, but I also want to say it shouldn't be necessary. I refer back to the text of two critically important recommendations that People Before Profit secured in the final report of the Special Committee on COVID-19 response. This final report was published 10 months ago in October 2020, and the first recommendation was as follows, that a public inquiry be established to investigate and report on all circumstances relating to each individual death from COVID-19 in nursing homes. Draft terms of reference should be presented for consideration by the Joint Committee on Health at the end of 2020. Many of us in this House worked for hours and hours and hours on this Special Committee, and its key recommendation did not even see the light of day at the Joint Committee on Health. It was a recommendation that we and People Before Profit were adamant about including in the Committee's report. The public are still clamouring for that inquiry, and the demand has been voiced week after week in the national media. We all know that the Prime Time Investigations report, and we all know that the Prime Time Investigates report showed many of the harrowing accounts of those who died from COVID-19 in nursing homes. Calls for public inquiries came from all sorts of parties, many of them very diverse, the Coroner's Society of Ireland and the Irish Association of Social Workers. As the Joint Committee for Health has not presented the Draft Terms of Reference within the timeframe recommended, I am returning to the demand for a public inquiry from the Special Covid Committee as a matter of urgency and fully back this motion. Specifically, I am requesting that a report be prepared on the Government's failure to implement this first and most crucial recommendation of the Special Committee on COVID-19. Its timescale for now moving to implement this recommendation is gone beyond urge. I will also be seeking the report for the Government's failure to implement the second recommendation that People Before Profit had listed on the Special Committee's report. A review shall be undertaken into the impact of privatisation of Ireland's nursing home sector and to ascertain its impact on nursing levels, expertise and qualifications of staff, medical and other facilities available in older people's care settings as a result of the policy decisions by previous administrations to incentivise care settings resulting in 80% of residential care being provided in private sector and the adequacy of funding to deliver optimum outcomes. We sought that review into the impact of privatisation because we refuse to be deflected from the significance of the most single momentous change to have taken place in the care of our vulnerable older people in recent decades. That is the whole scale privatisation of that sector to a situation where 80% of the care of vulnerable older people in need of long-term residential care has been handed over to the for-profit sector. In the private nursing home sector, which HICWA selected for particular mention in the report last July, it spoke about very limited clinical oversight of most nursing homes, particularly those in the private sector, and that is a quote directly from HICWA. I would remind you that private nursing home sectors continue to operate without an acceptable degree of financial transparency. In its report of August 2020, the COVID-19 nursing homes expert panel was clear on the need for greater financial transparency. The State's contribution of over $1 billion via the nursing home support scheme in 2019 and the fact that the contribution from the owner of private nursing homes, especially the larger consortia, remain unknown. It stated that funding and expenditures specifically invested by providers require greater transparency. This should be noted when any changes to the contribution that older people are expected to make, either through their assessable income or their assets to long-term residential care, must acknowledge the private sectors operate and how they operate and derive such benefit from the scheme. For that reason, we will be pushing for a return to the recommended review into the impact of privatisation on nursing home care. I just want to return to what was a very alarming report which HICWA brought before the Special COVID Committee in September 2020. Among other things, with great alarm, they told us that in the private home sector, they included an absence of clinical governments, an inadequacy of staffing levels, contingency plans in the event of sudden and unplanned absences were not available, the availability of resources such as PPE and access to specialised care and support was lacking, the impact of the layout of the centres on their ability to separate healthy and ill residents or to isolate ill residents as required, and the history of non-compliance with key regulations such as governance, management of premises, infection control, etc. But the manner in which the pandemic has impacted on nursing homes obliges us to confront the manner in which we have allowed long-term care of vulnerable older people to evolve in Ireland, and the very deliberate and highly ideological policy decisions that have underwritten that evolution. Neither the trauma of the government, its agencies or the nursing home sector can blind us to the questions we are obliged to pursue in relation to the deaths that have taken place in nursing home settings in Ireland. Some of the Starcourt figures were presented by Sage Advocacy and Age Action Ireland. They demonstrated to us that at that time, which was this time last year, July last year, 56% of all COVID deaths took place in nursing homes, a setting where only 0.65% of the entire population live. The HICWA report and its call on nursing homes in Ireland to be investigated said they were not in a position to have physical presence in nursing homes during the pandemic. But the fact remains that most of HICWA's inspectors did not conduct risk inspections in those nursing homes when an increasing number of them developed COVID-19 outbreaks. The families of those who lost their lives in these nursing homes need to know exactly what happened to their loved ones. A lack of communication from nursing homes was a common thread among many of the concerns expressed. Unanswered phone calls and unanswered queries caused immense anxiety and worry for concerned relatives and friends, particularly in the cases of nursing homes where severe outbreaks were reported. That immense distress at unanswered questions persists for those who lost relatives. A public inquiry which would provide answers to some of those questions is the very least that the Government owe these families. Unanswered careers in nursing homes and nursing homes were reached, ened we receive recommendations with ideological disease-based hospitalization to bemakers. Eastern醫生. Episode 42 Laham sta