My word.
My mind is drawn back to the nursing homes. The tax consolidation act of 1997 provided for section 268 relief on investment into some industrial buildings. It may have been the conception of the Celtic Tiger in many ways but when I looked at Prime TIme last night and Jack Lambert was on I was struck by the disparity between public v’s private nursing homes exacerbated by this tax relief. 420 private v’s 120 public. There was no way of pre-empting anything like this and many of the nursing homes that are privately owned have been brilliant care providers but it does ask a bigger question of how we need to take care of our elderly in future.
I got curious then and found a report which has a breakdown by some countries in Europe into how and who cares for the elderly. This seems to be the nucleus of the problem in Ireland. Yes elderly people are dying in nursing homes across the world but Ireland seems to be trending much higher. Lambert was saying that they cannot get nurses to willingly work in these homes. There was a 63 year old nurse who came out of retirement to work in these homes and had worked a series of consecutive 12 hour shifts with no break.
The extract below is a few years old but it appears that we are much higher than many of our EU counterparts. Realistically our figure now stands at 75% up from 65%. We cannot expect that these people will receive the same standards of care if they do not have access to a pool of nurses who are contracted to work in this setting. The system has ultimately failed our older generation.
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Conversely, the private homes have fared better in protecting the elderly in many cases. This is partlydue to the fact that they often have their own staff and don’t routinely have to use agency staff. I’d agree with your point about the disastrous effects of building your care system on a for profit basis though.
It’s FF/FG policy. They are prostitutes who will go around whoring all state resources to a few wealthy individuals and groupings, carvery sluts who want to be wooed at a fancy restaurant and are happy to pass assets/resources/services over to the private sector to profit from if they can engineer something in return for themselves.
Do they care about the citizens? Do they fuck?
If they can sort Dinny O’Brien or Ben Dunne or dodgy property developers or bankers out with something that is the important thing for them. Run down the public services, sell off state assets, let the shmucks who vote them in get priced out of healthcare and the housing market.
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Guess what @Fulvio_From_Aughnacloy, I know a lad who is a teacher in the HSE. I’d imagine youd love him.
Did anyone here catch it yet?
I think I that is fair comment. The resident contract for a nursing home is fair depressing. Infantilisation of elderly people.
The Swedes and Danes had the same, or less, critical care capacity than us. Which is the key point on Corona. You said they could cope better - how then?
Let’s have something more than empty statements.
Does thinking you had it count?
How come some of the thousands of people that signed up for that On Call For IRELAND initiative haven’t been deployed to nursing homes? Last mention I saw that they’d only actually hired a small number of people. Grim viewing on Prime Time last night of a nursing home owner crying and saying she can’t get staff.
They have a functioning health system.
It’s pointless talking to you, you will stand there defending the indefensible again and again. You can’t even acknowledge how FF and FG have destroyed healthcare in this state over the past 40 years.
“We expect to be in a position to share the exit strategy with the Irish public in the next couple of days, certainly over the weekend. We’ll be getting new advice from the Chief Medical Officer on Friday as to when we should start that process of reopening the economy and the country.”
I hate this shit from Varadkar. Completely pushing all responsibility for the management of this whole crisis to a medic. It’s not the first time he’s done it either.
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I got the impression that it was because there is an unwillingness to work in that setting. insufficient PPE, inadequate equipment and depleted staff numbers already. Moving an old person or showering them can be a 2 person job. Many probably need to be hoisted into bed. You would probably need some specialised training for that. There would probably not be a doctor there 24/7 either whereas you would have that in a hospital.
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There is no point in comparing death stats as they have not all released them. One though would be Sweden, who have been trying to count similar to us, and have 50% deaths the same.
Cheers, seems logical.
How so? They have the same, if not less, critical care beds. That is what is important here.
We aren’t even close to our new capacity.
So please introduce some facts here, “impossible to debate” means you can’t bring much of anything to the table.
As I also mentioned to you yesterday btw, even if we take the capacity argument as valid (which you have continually failed to do), it is IRRELEVANT to the curve being flattened and lower hospitalizations if social distancing similar to them is brought in. That is down to individuals behaviour. The number of people in critical care in Sweden flatlined two weeks ago.
Spot on. Nursing homes have had serious problems getting and retaining staff for the past few years. The pay rates are low and it is tough work. Some staff love the work and find it very rewarding, others hate it and leave quickly.
Getting a GP to support the home is also very difficult. The standard GP contract incentivises the GP to have a relatively healthy profile of patients who dont require home visits. There is no incentive to visit patients in a nursing home. Some NHs have been able to put retainers in place with GPs to take on a large proportion of the patients but it is not common.
The situation is reversed with pharmacies. Getting exclusive access to supply a NH puts large volume on the table for the pharmacy, as long as they will deliver large batches each week and on emergency as required.
Generally nursing homes do not have a doctor attached to the home as a whole. Each resident uses their own GP
The metric of a functional health system is not predicated on the number of critical care beds.
You seem to be blindly posting up figures you have little understanding behind, you did this last week defending FG profiting private healthcare interests in a crisis.
You are still defending the indefensible again, not surprising for a guy who thinks throwing money at private interests to build the world’s most expensive hospital is evidence of good governance.
Easing lockdown restrictions is inevitably going to bring the virus back up again and because of decades of FF/FG mismanagement of the health service, we will simply not be able to cope to the same degree the likes of Sweden and Denmark are able to.
If you took your head out of your Eoghan Murphy’s hole for once you might be able to see the absolute mess FG have made of the country.
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