Subvention: The daughter of a Dublin woman who claims she can no longer afford to supplement her 81-year-old mother's private nursing home fees plans to have her removed from the nursing home tomorrow and taken to a hospital A&E department.
Josephine Weafer plans to have her mother Mary Foster taken out of Kiltipper Woods Care Centre in Tallaght where the fees are €825 a week and deposited at the A&E unit of Tallaght Hospital, which she says will have to care for her.
Her mother has dementia and is highly dependant and cannot be cared for at home. By virtue of her age she is a medical card holder and is therefore, her daughter claims, entitled to a public nursing home bed, either in a public facility or by way of a bed contracted by the public health service from a private nursing home, but none of these options was available to her family when her mother left hospital after a stroke in 2003.
As a result they applied for nursing home subvention and her mother was awarded €506.80 a week subvention toward a private nursing home bed.
Ms Weafer, an only child, states she was happy to supplement this until the private nursing home raised its fees from €700 a week to €825 a week on December 1st. The home said this was because medical, nursing and energy costs had risen considerably.
The new rates mean even after Ms Foster's pension is taken into account, her daughter would have to pay almost €600 a month to supplement her mother's nursing home fees, if she remained in the home. She says she cannot afford this. Her elderly father lives in the family home in Terenure and cannot afford to pay towards his wife's care, Ms Weafer adds. She herself has a family of her own and mortgage payments to meet.
Following representations to the Health Service Executive in recent weeks it agreed to pay an extra €36 a week subvention towards her mother's care. However this still leaves her having to find around €7,000 a year to supplement her mother's care bill.
"I have been pushed to the limit and am now no longer able to supplement my mother's nursing care," she said.
She claims subvention payments, the means test for which was changed in last week's Budget, do not work because private nursing homes can change their fees at any time. The Government, she said, was giving these homes tax breaks yet they were "financially crippling families desperately trying to do what was best for their loved ones".
"The saddest part of this predicament for me is that my mother has become a bad debt . . . this is not what she wanted for her only child. I am so sad because she has become lost in this whole sorry saga," she said.
The HSE said it had carried out a thorough review of this case and had increased the subvention to "the maximum rate payable from its discretionary enhanced subvention budget". It added that the nursing homes fees in the private sector were entirely a matter for individual homes and could vary significantly. Subvention payments could be transferred by the HSE to an alternative nursing home for a client, it added.
Ms Weafer said she looked for another home but could find none in the area that was cheaper and had vacancies.