Sir, – I refer to the report (Home News, July 28th) regarding the proposed legislation that would make it a criminal offence to engage care staff for vulnerable people without proper vetting.
While I would welcome this progressive piece of legislation, I fear the legislation would be counterproductive if there isn’t a robust and adequate vetting system in place. I understand from nursing homes that the current Garda vetting bureau time delay is 10 weeks. The Government has advised that it is their intention to reduce this time to four weeks, but this would appear to be incompatible with the public sector embargo.
In essence, most admissions to long-stay residential institutions for older people are not planned events and are a result of a medical emergency, and as such waiting 10 weeks to vet a new nursing home or home-care staff member is unacceptable.
For this welcome legislation to be effective, the State must first adequately resource and streamline the Garda vetting bureau or outsource it to the private sector, with sufficient safeguards. – Yours, etc,