The CEO of Home and Community Care Ireland (HCCI) has said that Ireland is living in the Stone Age when it comes to giving older people options for the kind of housing they need.
Attempts to build retirement villages with houses or apartments adapted for older people are being blocked by gaps in policy and legislation, Joseph Musgrave said.
In contrast with successful developments in England and Australia, there are few such villages in Ireland along the lines of McAuley Place in Naas or Great Northern Haven in Dundalk.
These sites often include a GP practice and leisure facilities. The rooms are usually adaptable for changing health, with grab rails in bathrooms and wide lifts.
“We’re in the Stone Age; we’re nowhere on that,” he said, adding that people in France and England are developing expertise in this area but there is little movement in Ireland.
“HCCI knows of one business that wanted to develop approximately 50 housing units with supports for older people,” he said.
“This business would finance, develop, market, and maintain the housing, taking all the risk. In exchange, they asked the HSE for rights to deliver integrated care to that development. The HSE were supportive of the idea but have no framework to authorise it.”
This Irish business has had to shelve its plans for now, he said.
Speaking from the HCCI annual conference in Dungarvan, he said supported living is an alternative to the options of staying at home or moving to a nursing home.
You could think about a block of 20 apartments in Dungarvan, and you build them with older people in mind and only someone over the age of 65 can live in them.
He argued that retirement villages would be particularly helpful in rural areas, where finding homecare workers is challenging.
The biggest “red-light issue” in homecare, he said, is the “Eircode lottery, that where you live determines how available the homecare is”.
The biggest red-light issue is the ‘Eircode lottery, that where you live determines how available the homecare is’, said Joseph Musgrave. File picture
This is despite what he said is record Government investment in homecare since 2020, with far more hours now available.
“Our data shows if you look at the entirety of Dublin, with a population of 1.8m, it has a [homecare] waiting list of 527 people,” he said.
Cork has a waiting list of 1,100 people with just under 600,000 people in the whole county.
By offering older people the opportunity to live in smaller houses or apartments located in a shared space, it is easier to provide services, even in remote areas, he stressed.
“Multiple State agencies, Government departments, approved housing bodies, and local authorities have produced research, toolkits, and case studies about housing with supports for older people,” he said.
“Ireland is good at talking about building these options, the problem is there is no framework to actually build them.”