Government confident phase one of easing restrictions to go ahead, Dáil hears

A new funding model for nursing homes needs to be considered along with more and better home care, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has told the Dáil.

He said “we need to consider a move away from large, modern, newly-built, 150 to 200-bed, single-room nursing homes towards smaller units, as we have done in the disability sector”.

He said care homes needed to be better integrated with the health service to provide for more involvement of therapists, geriatricians and infection control nurses.

“ We must avoid hospitals as much as possible and ensure that there is a medical director as well as a person in charge,” he said.

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The Taoiseach was speaking in the Dáil during a debate on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

He said there was a high percentage of deaths in nursing homes internationally including countries where total numbers are low like Norway, Canada and New Zealand.

“ It does not seem that any country has been wholly successful in keeping Covid out of its care homes and we are not alone in experiencing this tragedy.”

But he said Ireland was the second country after San Marino to have tested all residents and staff in all nursing homes and plans were being made for retesting.

‘Fire in retreat’

Mr Varadkar also told the House that the Government was increasingly confident that phase one of easing restrictions will go ahead on Monday.

The virus “is a fire in retreat. We must quench its every spark and stamp out every ember.”

Every death and new cases was a cause for serious concern over the last seven days they had seen the lowest daily number of cases and deaths.

“As a result we are increasingly confident we will be able to be phase 1 on Monday.”

The Cabinet will make its decision on Friday after receiving the advice of the National Public Health Emergency Team.

He warned however that “we are still in phase zero, The moment we assume progress is inevitable, we risk going backwards.”

In phase one up to four people who do not live together can meet outdoors while socially distancing. Shops based mainly outdoors including garden centres, hardware stores and farmers’ markets, can also reopen.

Addressing the masks

The Government wants to get the economy “humming”. The Health and Safety Authority will work co-operatively with businesses to get them up and running, but “it will close works places if necessary”.

He said the Government was considering the regulations on passenger location forms and self-isolation. But he warned that there is a land border they wanted to keep open, and a common travel areas with the UK that they wanted to preserve. The Government wants to resume normal travel for business, leisure, study and visits to friends as early as they could “but it is going to be months not weeks before this is possible”.

Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin said the question of whether people should wear face masks has gone on for “too long” and should be definitively addressed.

He said fears that introducing such a policy would undermine the supply of personal protective equipment “seem overblown, when you see the impact on many other countries.”