Transforming Community Care in Ireland

Where We Stand

Community care is working better than many realise. The Enhanced Community Care Programme helped 7,000 frail adults avoid hospital admissions in 2024 alone, with Community Specialist Teams for Older People completing 133,000 patient contacts—a 31.5% increase. Virtual clinics for heart conditions reduced hospital attendance by 85%. Remote monitoring pilots for COPD achieved a 100% success rate in preventing hospitalisations.

The Challenges We're Not Talking About Enough

The GP Shortage

Ireland has roughly one GP per 1,150 residents. That's the national average. In reality, 149,000 people live over 15 minutes from a GP practice, and some face 30-minute journeys. By 2040, we'll need between 943 and 1,211 additional GPs to meet basic demand—yet 30% of current GPs plan to retire by 2028.

Digital Health: We're Dangerously Behind

Here's something that should concern us all: Ireland ranks dead last in the EU for e-health maturity, with only 11.4% progress toward universal electronic health records. That's compared to a 79% EU average. We're the only European country without a national EHR system.

Most Irish hospital records are still maintained on paper. When a patient moves between services—from their GP to a specialist to a community nurse—their records often travel by post or email. It's 2025, and we're still doing this.

The Coming Wave

By 2040, one in five people in Ireland will be 65 or older. Home support demand is expected to rise by up to 91% by then. We'll need at least 15,000 additional nursing home beds. These aren't predictions from pessimists; they're projections from the Department of Health research.

Why Technology Actually Matters

Proven Results from Irish Pilots

The Letterkenny COPD virtual ward continuously monitored ten patients from home, achieving 100% success in preventing hospital admissions. The Wexford telehealth pilot achieved 96% medication adherence in heart disease, COPD, and diabetes patients. Mater Hospital's new AI Centre correctly identifies strokes and fractures within 2-3 minutes of scan completion with over 90% accuracy—critical when every minute counts for stroke patients.

Irish medtech companies are leading innovation. SymPhysis Medical enables terminally ill cancer patients to spend more time at home. Fire1 is helping heart failure patients manage their medication from the comfort of their own living rooms. Vantive's home-based dialysis approach saves patients 624 hours per year at renal centres, with 29% able to return to work.

Mobile X-ray services reached over 600 nursing homes in 2024, with 95% of patients treated at home rather than requiring hospital transfers.

What This Means in Practice

What Needs to Happen

1. Fix Core Digital Infrastructure

Ireland must finally build a national EHR system with a realistic timeline and sustained funding. The business case was submitted in 2016—nine years ago. We're falling further behind Europe every year we delay.

The national e-Prescription service (NePS) must roll out across GPs and pharmacies as scheduled. Interoperability standards must be mandatory for all new systems.

2. Invest in People

Technology fails without trained people to use it. Ireland needs mandatory digital literacy training for healthcare staff—short, flexible, ongoing modules that fit demanding schedules. Almost 40% of healthcare workers worry about causing security incidents; 62% feel digitally poor in their roles despite working in 'highly digitalised' organisations.

Equally critical is the need to help patients engage with digital tools. Almost half of Irish adults lack basic digital skills. Technology must work for everyone, not just the tech-savvy.

3. Fund Community Care Properly

Budget 2025 allocated €25.8 billion to the health sector. Budget 2026 provides €27.4 billion. These are genuine increases, but they're modest against projected demand. With home support hours needing to grow from 23.8 million (2024) to potentially 45 million (2040), current trajectories won't suffice.

The statutory home support scheme must finally be implemented with adequate funding. Care workers deserve sustainable employment, not precarious 30-minute shifts. Every €1 million invested in home care generates a €1.9 million economic return—the business case is clear.

4. Get the Workforce Right

We need between 15,000 and 20,000 additional healthcare workers by 2040—not because we want to be generous, but because the numbers demand it. This requires competitive compensation, clear career pathways, and recognition that care workers do essential, skilled work.

Training places for GPs have expanded to 350 new entrants yearly—good, but insufficient. We need more, faster.

The Vision

Ireland could lead Europe in digital health if we chose to. We have innovative companies. We have world-class clinicians. We have a healthcare system that, despite chronic underfunding, still delivers remarkable care in many places.

What we lack is political consistency, patient funding, and the willingness to acknowledge that transformation requires simultaneous investment in people, technology, and time.

The alternative is clear: hospital waiting lists that grow regardless of budget increases, GP practices that close to new patients, rural areas where specialised care requires all-day hospital trips, and elderly people spending months in residential facilities because they can't access supported home care quickly enough.

The Real Opportunity

Community care powered by thoughtful technology isn't about replacing healthcare professionals with apps. It's about freeing them from administrative burden so they can focus on what only humans provide: clinical judgment, compassion, advocacy, and presence.

A nurse using technology to manage patient data efficiently provides better care than one drowning in paperwork. A GP with instant access to a complete patient history makes better decisions. A care worker coordinating via app spends more time with patients, less time driving between disconnected appointments.