'Chronic' lack of personal assistants

THERE WAS a danger that nursing homes would become the “new warehouses” for housing people with disabilities, a conference was warned yesterday.

The Director of the Forum for People With Disabilities, Donal Toolan, said there were now so many nursing homes throughout the State that there were clear policy implications for people with significant physical and sensory disabilities. He was addressing a conference hosted by the advocacy group, Greater Dublin Independent Living

The conference heard how the paucity of personal care assistant packages was forcing people with physical and sensory disabilities to forgo offers of housing and employment opportunities.

Mr Doolan said the option of accommodating people with disabilities in nursing homes rather than provide personal assistance packages disrespected their human dignity.

“Over the last decade we have tax-incentivised the building of nursing homes like we’ve tax-incentivised golf-clubs.”

At the same time, he said, full employment had effectively “denuded” communities of a “care community” and no alternative community had been developed to care for people “whether they were disabled or older people”.

“The fear now is that all these nursing homes have been established and have employees, and once these institutions have been built they need to eat up numbers to fill them.”

There was a chronic lack of funding for personal assistants to enable people to live independently, the conference heard.

A mother told the conference how her physically disabled daughter, now in her 30s, had applied for a personal assistant to enable her move out of her parents’ home, 10 years ago. “We don’t know how to even get on the first rung of the ladder.”

Mr Doolan said the favoured option was to move people once they had completed rehabilitation care either home to parents, spouse or partner, or into a nursing home. These were “totally inappropriate” places to house people with disabilities, depriving them of basic choices such as what to eat, when to eat and when to get up in the morning.

He quoted figures from the 2002 Census which showed that among those aged 25-29, 39 per cent were living with their parents compared with 32 per cent of those without disabilities. Among the 35-39 age group, 16 per cent of people with disabilities lived with their parents, compared with 8 per cent without disabilities.