"I would be lost without the home help hours"

An Athlone native caring for her 91-year-old father, who has cancer, and her 88-year-old mother, who has dementia, is one of the people waiting to find out if the €130m spending cuts announced by the HSE last week will impact on her parents' care. The woman, who asked not to be named, said her parents currently receive seven and a half hours of home help each week, along with some palliative care hours. "If they took it away I would be absolutely lost. I don't know what I'd do without it," she said yesterday (Tuesday). The home help relieves the pressure on her and allows her to go into town and do the shopping. "I'm very close to my parents and I want to be able to care for them at home, but if they took away that support it would be devastating," she said. A mother of teenagers, she cares for her parents on a full-time basis and applied for the carers allowance last year but hasn't been granted it yet. The latest cutbacks in the health service were announced on Thursday and include reductions in the use of agency staff and overtime, the cutting of 600,000 home help hours, cuts to homecare packages and cuts to personal assistant hours for the disabled. It's the second cut to hme help hours this year. A spokesperson for the HSE's Dublin Mid-Leinster region said it was "working to develop implementation plans in order to give effect" to the planned cuts. "These plans would be "developed and discussed with staff and unions over the coming week."