The head of the Cheshire Foundation has said that some disabled people have to sleep in wheelchairs because services lack the staff needed to put them to bed. The Foundation and eight other national organisations are claiming that the lack of Government money is putting services at risk in an unprecedented campaign to highlight chronic under-funding by the State in the physically and sensory disabled.
The nine organisations provide vital services to 40,000 people with disabilities ranging from cerebral palsy to blindness and deafness. Co-chairman, Mark Blake-Knox, of the Cheshire Foundation, said that the latest Budget came as a slap in the face for them.
This has spurred them into going public for the first time under the banner 'Unseen, Unheard and Unfair, the forgotten 40,000'. They claim that, in a major audit, the Department of Health estimated that this year alone €38m was needed by the services. However, the Budget delivered only one sixth of this: €6.4m.
Frank Flannery of the Rehab Group said that the Department's own report showed that continued under-funding needed to be addressed urgently. It admits that up to 1,000 extra staff are needed to effectively deliver the existing services throughout the country.
Angela Kerins, also of Rehab, said that there were major health and safety risks to staff and clients who were very dependent, and that an accident was waiting to happen. Paul Kiely of the Central Remedial Clinic said that staff, such as therapists, were spreading themselves so thinly that services were not all they should be.
Conditions in community-based services seem to be worst of all. A representative of the Wheelchair Association described how a staff member slept in a temporary bed in an annex between a bedroom and a kitchen.
There was insufficient room to put a mechanical hoist for lifting a 50-year-old man to his shower and toilet in the annex. As the client's father was 90, two staff-members were required for the job, but only one was available.
