NURSING HOMES, both public and private, will have to pay thousands of euro in annual fees to cover the cost of a new independent nursing homes inspection regime being put in place from July, it was confirmed yesterday.
The annual fee payable has been set at €190 per bed in each home, which means an average- sized private nursing home with 40-50 beds will have to pay €7,600-€9,500 to the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) which will carry out the inspections.
The cost to the HSE of the fees in respect of public nursing home beds will be €1.9 million in a full year. Minister for Health Mary Harney said the executive would have to meet the half-year cost of the new scheme from within its own resources this year. This is despite the fact that the HSE is already faced with making cuts to address a potential deficit of more than €1 billion.
In addition to the annual fees payable, each nursing home will also have to pay a €500 registration charge every three years. However, homes already pay a registration fee so it is the new annual fee payable to cover independent inspections which is causing concern.
Tadhg Daly, chief executive of Nursing Homes Ireland, said the fee would have to be passed on to residents. He said his organisation wanted to meet Ms Harney on the issue.
Ms Harney said the new fee structure was in line with what was happening in the UK. Mr Daly has claimed the fee was almost four times that of the UK.
The new fees were outlined yesterday at the publication of a set of new national standards for residential care settings. They require nursing homes to have care plans in place for each resident and require larger wards to be phased out over the next six years.
They say homes must have “enough staff on duty” but do not specify staffing ratios. A team of nearly 50 inspectors will assess nursing homes.
Dr Marion Witton, chief inspector of social services at HIQA, said inspectors would carry out both announced and unannounced inspections both day and night. She said inspectors would report “without fear or favour” on what they found and their findings would be published. She said the publication of the new standards, which are underpinned by regulations, would help restore confidence in the sector.
At present, the HSE inspects private nursing homes twice a year and public homes are not inspected at all. Dr Witton said that under the new regime homes would be risk rated, with the higher risk ones being inspected more often.
Ms Harney said there were many who felt in the current climate that the introduction of the new process should be postponed. However, she felt it was important it commence in July.
She confirmed it would be a challenge for some of the public nursing homes to meet some of the standards because they were so old. However, the HSE had already begun moving older people out of some homes which would not meet the standards and this had caused controversy, she said.
“These standards will be vigorously and robustly enforced,” she added.
There are about 19,000 private and 8,000 public nursing homes beds in the State, which means HIQA can expect an annual income from them of about €5 million.