[ Tue 11/03/2008 by Niall Hunter, Editor]
New quality and safety standards for the care of older people in private and public residential settings were published today by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA).
Nursing home owners, however, have warned that it is inevitable that the new standards will drive up the cost of care, and that this issue needs to be addressed.
The standards will be used to assess nursing home care under a new inspection regime which will be run by HIQA and is expected to be introduced later this year once the relevant regulations are drawn up by the Department of Health.
HIQA said today that under the new system, for the first time, all residential care settings for older people run by private and public providers will be inspected by an independent authority.
There is a set of 32 quality standards now set out, which detail the rights of residents in the areas of protection, health and social care needs, quality of life and staffing.
For example, under the protection heading, the standards stress that a resident should be protected from bullying, neglect, harassment, discrimination and any other form of abuse.
Tadhg Daly of NHI said they welcomed in particularly confirmation that the Department of Health would undertake a regulatory impact assessment in advance of the implementation of the new standards.
Age Action Ireland welcomed the new standards, saying the publication represented a landmark development on the road to helping protect some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
It warned, however, that the existence of standards alone will not ensure that nursing home residents are any safer than they were in the past.
Age Action said it will be watching to ensure that firm regulations are introduced by the Department of Health to support the new standards and that the regulations are then strictly enforced.
The full set of standards can be viewed by clicking on...
http://www.hiqa.ie/media/pdfs/HIQA_Residential_Care_Standards_2008.p
Abridged
SOURCE: irishHealth
--------------------------------------------------
More Recent Posts from Spotlight on Elder Abuse
No comments:
Post a Comment