A FALL-OFF in volunteers and a lack of State support are threatening meals-on-wheels services which provide assistance to 12,000 older people on a daily basis, a new report has warned.
Research commissioned by the State's advisory body on issues affecting senior citizens - the National Council on Ageing and Older People - says the service provides a vital support to older people who might otherwise need long-stay residential care to remain in their own homes.
But it also points to a range of shortcomings affecting the quality of the service. It says the service is patchy in many parts of the country and is heavily reliant on volunteers at a time when the numbers available to work on a voluntary basis are declining.
It also found that almost 7 per cent of clients interviewed were malnourished, while just over 25 per cent were at risk of malnutrition.
More than half were either overweight or obese, although more than three-quarters of all interviewees believed they had no nutritional problems.
Among the deficiencies identified include:
- The absence of regulations that would guarantee minimum nutritional standards for clients.
- Evidence that some meals-on-wheels services may be failing to provide clients with some vital nutrients, including vitamin C, vitamin D, folate and calcium.
- A lack of impetus to restructure and develop services that have developed organically over the past 50 years.
- Significant variations in the number of services operating in each county.
The report is the first major analysis of meals-on-wheels provision ever undertaken in Ireland and was carried out by a research team at the social policy and ageing research centre at Trinity College Dublin.
Meals-on-wheels services first came to Ireland in the 1960s and has grown into a central element of community-based services for older people, assisting thousands of people who might otherwise need long-stay residential care to remain at home.
The report sets out a number of options for the development of the service into the future. They include improving the current system, with more financial support from the State; contracting out meals-on-wheels to community, voluntary or private sector companies staffed by paid employees; or restructuring community and voluntary organisations.
