Family carers demand more support as State services grapple with staff shortages
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Family carers have demanded more supports as they are having to take on a greater burden while State services grapple with staff shortages.
As previously reported in this newspaper, the Cork/Kerry region is 21% down on homecare staff with a largescale HSE recruitment campaign underway aimed at hiring 300 people. In the Mid-West region covering Limerick, Clare, and North Tipperary the HSE is also recruiting staff with 70 to be added this year.
Teena Gates, broadcaster and full-time carer for her father (96) who has dementia, caught Covid-19 in early December. To add to pressures on the family, HSE-provided carers did not come for eight days which she understands was due to staff shortages.
“I feel my own experience is mirrored around the country,” she said. “I am anxious to push for supports and information for new family carers starting out on this journey with no information, training, or idea of what lies ahead.”
Ms Gates and other similarly-affected carers met recently to discuss ways to advocate as a group for better supports, as part of the Care Champions movement.
“We are facing a national crisis in lack of staffing and recruitment of professional carers, and that is having a knock-on effect for family carer supports,” she said.
She called for salaries and working conditions for professional carers to be improved.
“If we don’t improve things for family carers, who will take up that role in the future?” she asked. “People will be too scared to take on such an impossible task, and the elderly and vulnerable will eventually suffer.”
She pointed to recent cancellations of care in her own situation, saying many families report similar problems. On January 1 and 2, their HSE-funded care company in Dublin cancelled hours “at short notice”. That followed similar last-minute cancellations on Christmas Day and St Stephen’s Day.
She had planned to do a New Year’s Day swim for LauraLyn Children’s Hospice which then had to be postponed, she said.
Advocacy group Family Carers Ireland has estimated up to 500,000 people are caring for relatives at home, keeping them out of hospitals and nursing homes. They have criticised the Government for delays in updating the National Carers Strategy which was last published in 2012.
“Carers need to be recognised and valued. They need access to information and support; help to balance their caring responsibilities with paid employment and to preserve their own health and wellbeing,” a spokesperson said, saying an updated strategy would address these issues.