RCDC ‘outraged’ by minister’s letter

Roscrea Community Development Council (RCDC) has received correspondence from the Private Secretary to the Minister for Health, which suggests that when the new community nursing unit in Nenagh is built that older people requiring long-term residential care in a community nursing unit setting from Roscrea and district will have to go to Nenagh.

RCDC is outraged at this suggestion and has written to all Tipperary TDs to ensure that the Government, and thus the HSE, adheres to the principle that people from Roscrea who require long-term care in a community nursing, are entitled to receive it in their own community and not be treated in the undignified manner in which the Department of Health is suggesting. The following extract from the department’s letter is very explicit and extremely worrying for the community says RCDC: “There is a new Community Nursing Unit on the Capital Plan in Nenagh to facilitate Older Persons Residential Services; however, the HSE is committed to prioritising short stay capacity in Dean Maxwell on completion of the new Community Nursing Unit in Nenagh”.

RCDC has written to Tipperary TDs, again soliciting their commitment to ensuring that the long-term residential care services are maintained in Roscrea. It said: “The older people of our community are entitled to much more than a bed, 20 miles away, from their community in their twilight years. We would have thought that such treatment of older people by the State belonged to a bye-gone era!”