Cork and Kerry need 4,000 extra nursing home beds in next 15 years

Cork and Kerry may need more than 4,000 additional nursing home beds in the next 15 years as the amount of people over aged 85 is set to increase by 145%, a new report has shown.

The report by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has put together projections of regional demand and bed capacity requirements for older people’s care in Ireland, by 2040, based on the Hippocrates model, which provides base year estimates and projections of healthcare demand, capacity, and expenditure for selected Irish health and social care services.

The ESRI report shows that in the South West, made up of Cork and Kerry, there were 469 short stay and 4,351 long stay nursing home beds in 2022.

By 2040, they predict that an additional 307 to 412 short stay and 2,743 to 3,676 long stay beds will be needed.

This means that in 15 years’ time, a total of 7,870 to 8,908 short and long-stay beds will be needed, representing an increase of between 63% to 85%.

Increase

The current amount of beds would need to increase by around 3% each year for both short and long-term beds to reach this projected demand figure, ESRI researchers predicted.

The report states that an additional 2.4m to 3.5m hours of support are expected to be needed to serve a growing older population in the region, as the amount of people aged 0-64 is set to rise 9% while there will be 62% and 145% increases in the population aged 65+ and 85+ respectively by 2040.

It comes as The Echo previously publicised an ongoing shortage of nursing home beds in Cork, which have left older people unable to be discharged from hospital, and led to people being placed in residential care far from their homes, sometimes leaving their partner unable to visit.

The Cork-based chief executive of Nursing Homes Ireland (NHI), Tadhg Daly, previously told The Echo that a national nursing home care policy was needed, as Ireland faces a “major care capacity crisis”.