Home helps in court over cuts

THE WORKING conditions of up to 10,000 home helps will be considered by the Labour Court tomorrow.

Trade union Siptu is leading the case of the mainly women workers, whose jobs, the union says, are being outsourced and downgraded while the quality of the service provided was “under constant attack”.

The home helps are employed directly by the Health Service Executive (HSE) or by agencies funded by it.

Home helps provide a range of services to clients, mainly elderly people, to help them remain in their own homes rather then move into a nursing or other institutional setting. Their services range from light housework and cooking to giving clients medicines, changing dressings and helping with personal hygiene.

Siptu health division organiser Paul Bell said there was an “agenda of privatisation” in the HSE’s home help service, which would see the service increasingly provided by “for-profit organisations” whose aims would be to drive down costs by cutting wages and the amount of time a home help could give to clients.

The HSE has concluded a procurement process for the provision of homecare services with a number of private operators “for the provision of enhanced homecare packages”. It said private providers would provide care packages to new clients, while those who already had packages would not be affected.