Patients Advocacy Service
Submission to Ireland’s COVID-19 Evaluation
Residential Care Module: The Response to COVID-19 in Long-Term Residential Care Facilities for Older Persons 2025
1. About the Patient Advocacy Service
The Patient Advocacy Service (PAS) is a free, independent, and confidential service providing empowerment advocacy to people who wish to make a formal complaint about the care they have received in a public acute hospital, a HSE-operated or HSE-funded nursing home, or a private nursing home. PAS is commissioned and funded by the National Patient Safety Office within the Department of Health and is provided under the auspices of the National Advocacy Service for People with Disabilities (NAS). PAS is fully independent of the HSE and all other service providers.
Patient advocacy Service was established in October 2019, initially with a remit covering public acute hospitals which in June 2021 was extended to HSE/HSE funded Nursing homes. Following this, the remit was subsequently extended to private nursing homes through the Health Act 2007 (Care and Welfare of Residents in Designated Centres for Older People) (Amendment) Regulations 2022, which took effect on 1 March 2023.
Before this, during the pandemic, the Department of Health requested that Patient Advocacy Services become available to residents of [Provider name redacted thoughout document is with Evaluation] nursing home in 2020.
2. Methodology and Evidence Base
This submission draws on three distinct sources of evidence, each of which is cited explicitly throughout where findings are drawn from it.
The first and primary source is a focus group conducted in early 2026 with PAS advocates who provided frontline support during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically in relation to long-term residential care for older persons. The focus group explored their direct experience of supporting residents, families, the systemic issues they encountered, and their reflections on what worked well and what did not. Participants included advocates who worked directly on cases arising from the Nursing Home in 2020, as well as advocates who handled inquiries from the broader public nursing home sector from 2021 onwards. All contributions from the focus group have been anonymised in this submission.
Where advocate testimony is drawn upon, it reflects patterns observed across multiple cases and contacts. This source is cited as ‘PAS Focus Group, 2026’ throughout.
The second source is the NAS and PAS submission to the Oireachtas Special Committee on Covid-19 Response, submitted on 1 July 2020. This document provides a published record of the issues experienced by residents, families, and advocates in the early months of the pandemic, including in nursing home settings. It is cited as ‘NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission, July 2020’ throughout.
The third source is the NAS/PAS report Advocacy Matters: Advocating for People with Disabilities in Residential and Day Services During the Covid-19 Pandemic (October 2021). This report covers the period March 2020 to March 2021 and documents the experience of NAS advocates supporting people with disabilities in residential and day services during the pandemic. It is primarily a NAS report focused on disability residential services rather than nursing homes for older people specifically. Where it is cited in this submission, it is for the findings that are directly relevant to the residential care experience, specifically on the mental health impacts of visiting restrictions, the failure of restrictions to reflect a human rights-based approach, and the poor communication of public health guidance to people living in residential settings. It is cited as ‘Advocacy Matters, October 2021’ throughout.
Together these sources provide a cross-agency submission to Government, and a reflective practitioner account gathered at a later point, offering observations grounded in direct frontline experience rather than documentary analysis alone.
3. PAS and COVID-19: An Organisation Responding to a Crisis
The Department of Health requested that PAS extend its service to the families of residents during this time. This was the first deployment of PAS into the nursing home sector and would ultimately inform the legislative expansion of PAS’s remit later.
“The Department requested, as a once off measure and for the purposes of providing additional supports, that the Patient Advocacy Service extend its service to Nursing Home in order to support families during this time. I understand that the CEO of the HSE met with family members of residents in the nursing home. Minister Donnelly and I also met with the families of residents to hear their perspectives.”
— Minister of State for Mental Health and Older People
This demonstrated both the urgent need for independent advocacy in private nursing homes and PAS’s capacity to deliver it under crisis conditions.
4. Focus Group Findings: The Experience of PAS Advocates
The following themes emerged from the PAS advocate focus group (2026). They are presented in the advocates’ own words where possible. Where findings from the focus group are corroborated by the NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission (July 2020) or Advocacy Matters (October 2021), this is noted explicitly.
5.1 Care Plans, and What Families Did Not Know
One of the most striking findings from the focus group was the extent to which families arriving at PAS had no prior knowledge of the systems and standards governing their relative’s care.
Advocates described the issue at : families had never been told about care plans. When families eventually obtained these documents through the complaints process, what they found was, in some cases, troubling.
“They had no idea about care plans. When they got the care plans, it was the information in them that was really shocking. There was some people who were on these really heavy psychotropic medications for behaviour.”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
“There was a big realisation that people didn’t know a complaints policy was there. They didn’t know how to raise their issues.”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
There was a pattern of families not knowing their rights and not knowing the standards governing their relative’s care.
5.2 Communication: Absence of Information
Poor communication between nursing homes and families emerged as the single most consistent theme across all three evidence sources in this submission.
At , families described hearing about the outbreak through the media before any contact from the nursing home. Phones went unanswered. Families could not get through to staff. Some learned that the HSE had taken over management of the nursing home through news coverage rather than any direct communication.
“In the early days it was a really worrying time, they couldn’t get through on phones, and they were just hearing bits in the media that the nursing home had been taken over by the HSE. Phones weren’t being answered, they weren’t being able to get in.”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
For families already separated from their loved ones by visiting restrictions, the absence of information compounded an already devastating experience. The NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission of July 2020 documented the same problem across the sector: there was no central hub available to access data regarding the spread of Covid-19 in nursing homes, leading to anxiety and fear, while suitable IT infrastructure had not been provided for residents to contact their families.
Advocates noted that poor communication was not confined to the acute phase of the pandemic. Inquiries received throughout 2021 and 2022 continued to cite communication as a concern.
Residents also left uninformed: A further dimension of communication failure that emerged in the focus group, and which was also documented in the NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission, was the experience of residents themselves being kept in the dark about what was happening in their own home.
“The residents themselves weren’t really being told what was going on, possibly because staff didn’t want to worry them..”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
The NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission echoed this pattern, noting reports from private nursing homes that residents were anxious because they were not being kept up to date on developments. The Advocacy Matters report (October 2021) similarly documents that poor communication of public health guidance was a major cause of worry for people in residential settings, documenting that people said they were not being kept up to date on the latest developments and that communication was lacking from staff.
5.3 Visiting Restrictions and the Consistency Gap
The visiting restrictions imposed during the pandemic left some of the deepest and most enduring wounds on the families and residents who experienced them. Advocates were unequivocal about the lasting impact on people they supported, including cases still ongoing more than five years later.
“There was families who were standing at the windows, looking at their loved one dying, whereas other people were getting to go in and see their family members, so there was no consistency in how that was being managed.”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
Critically, advocates identified not only the human cost of visiting restrictions, but their inconsistency. National guidelines existed, including a caveat, present even in the early 2020 guidance, that end-of-life visits should be facilitated even during outbreaks, but the application of those guidelines varied between nursing homes. Whether a family could be present as their loved one died could depend not on national policy, but on which nursing home their relative happened to be in.
“Whatever the policy is, there has to be consistency..”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
Advocates also drew attention to a deeply distressing contradiction in some cases: families who had been refused entry while their relative was alive and dying were permitted access once the person had died. The NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission noted the same issue, recording that visiting was restricted to end-of-life patients in hospitals due to Covid-19, with no consistent application of this across services.
It is significant that the national HPSC guidelines, even in their early iterations, included provision for end-of-life visiting. The problem was not what the guidelines said, it was that nursing homes were either unaware of the most current version, lacked the staff or infrastructure to implement them, or were applying blanket restrictions without individualised assessment.
5.4 The Impact of Visiting Restrictions on Mental Health and Wellbeing
Alongside the specific and irreversible harm of being denied presence at a loved one’s death, advocates spoke to a broader concern: the impact of prolonged visiting restrictions on the mental and emotional health of both residents and their families.
“I think people would probably say to you now: I would have taken a risk, even if it wasn’t end of life, to say, could I get in at least once to have seen my parents during that time. I’d say that’s probably 100% of people.”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
This finding is reported already by the Advocacy Matters report (October 2021), which documented that visiting restrictions imposed during the pandemic had a negative effect on the mental health of people living in residential services, resulting in feelings of isolation, anxiety, and fear. The report stated explicitly that these restrictions failed to reflect HIQA’s National Standards and its Guidance on a Human Rights-Based Approach in Health and Social Care Services, which stress that service providers must ensure people are supported to maintain and develop personal relationships with family and others.
Advocates observed that the framework within which visiting restrictions were assessed was too narrowly focused on infection risk and insufficiently attentive to the health risks posed by isolation. As one advocate noted after reviewing the actual HPSC guidance documents:
“.. it has a detrimental effect on quality of life. Not visiting is a risk too, it has a really bad impact”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
A rights-based, person-centred approach consistent with Sláintecare’s vision and with HIQA’s own human rights guidance would have required an explicit, documented balancing of these competing health risks.
5.5 The Complaints Process: Inaccessible, Incomplete, and Without Independent Review
For families who sought to make formal complaints about care received during the pandemic, the complaints process offered little meaningful recourse. Advocates described a system that was inaccessible and slow.
At , some families who pursued complaints did not receive satisfactory information. Some received files that were heavily redacted and of little practical use. The internal review process was frustrating for families as the reviewer was not independent.
“The reviewer was not independent of the nursing home. And essentially there was no point going for a review, because they basically said that all of the information provided in the complaint response was accurate, even where it might not have been.”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
The NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission of July 2020 identified the same problem, noting that PAS advocates had found it very difficult to progress complaints and gain access to freedom of information requests for people, and that ongoing complaints prior to the pandemic had also been stalled even where timeframes had already been exhausted.
Unlike HSE-operated nursing homes, private nursing homes are not covered by the Freedom of Information Act, making it significantly harder for families to access records. This structural inequality — identified in 2020 and not yet resolved — means that families in private nursing homes remain at a disadvantage in seeking accountability. Advocates noted a further problem:
“The learning kind of went nowhere, because ‘we can’t take responsibility for who came before us.’ I can’t even say for sure that there was learning for anyone.
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
5.6 Staffing Issues
The NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission of July 2020 identified the overreliance on agency staff who moved between nursing homes as a significant infection control failure, and noted that physical distancing measures were often poor, with some nursing homes not having capacity for social distancing due to shared rooms.
At , staffing levels were inadequate.
More broadly, advocates raised the systemic absence of mandated minimum staffing ratios for private nursing homes as a fundamental gap that must be addressed. Current regulation requires a ‘mix of skills’ but does not specify minimum numbers of staff per resident, making it impossible to establish, monitor, or enforce the staffing levels that safe care requires.
5.7 Medical Oversight and the Limits of Nursing Care
A theme that emerged with particular clarity in the focus group was the inadequacy of medical oversight in nursing homes during the pandemic.
Advocates described families being told that nursing homes could not ‘take responsibility’ for a hospital transfer, leaving residents in deteriorating condition without access to medical assessment. The NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission documented the same problem, noting concerns raised about transfers to hospital and the lack of a clear decision-making framework when GP access was curtailed.
5.8 Physical Preparedness: The Basic Infrastructure of Safe Care
One of the more unexpected themes to emerge from the focus group was the basic physical unpreparedness of some nursing homes for an infectious disease outbreak. The NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission had already documented in July 2020 that many private nursing homes did not have adequate amounts of the correct PPE. The focus group confirmed this in specific and stark detail.
“There weren’t enough bin bags. Bins were overflowing. They didn’t have enough thermometers… didn’t have enough incontinence wear.”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
As advocates observed, if nursing homes were unprepared at this basic level for a novel pandemic, it raises legitimate questions about their preparedness for routine outbreaks of seasonal flu or norovirus in ordinary years.
5.9 National Guidelines and Practice on the Ground
One of the most significant findings from the focus group, which also emerged in the NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission, was the persistent gap between national guidelines and what was actually happening in nursing homes.
Advocates noted that HPSC guidance was updated frequently throughout the pandemic, presenting a practical challenge for facilities managing acute operational pressure with reduced staff. One advocate recalled:
“I remember constantly looking for those guidelines, they were constantly changing”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
A specific and illustrative example arose around visiting restrictions. By a certain point in the pandemic, national guidelines had been updated to include the concept of a ‘nominated support person’ or ‘lead visitor’, a person who, even during a lockdown period, could maintain contact with a resident, particularly one living with dementia. The nursing home in a particular inquiry was still applying an earlier, more restrictive version of the guidance and was entirely unaware of this development.
“That is just an example of a nursing home that was following the guidelines from a previous version. The guidelines had been updated to allow a nominated support person even during a lockdown, but the nursing home didn’t know.”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
This pattern is one of the most fundamental lessons of the pandemic period. The gap between policy and practice requires structural solutions.
5.10 Reflections on Advocacy During the Pandemic
The focus group provided a space to reflect honestly on the experience of providing advocacy during an extraordinary period.
For advocates working on cases, the work involved supporting families through grief, through a complaints process that was often failing them.
The NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission documented that PAS advocates found it very difficult to progress complaints and FOI requests for people, and that a lack of information, technology, and safe spaces had impeded communication between advocates and people living in nursing homes and residential settings.
When PAS began its public nursing home pilot in 2021, advocates found that recurring lockdowns severely hampered their ability to establish presence and ensure that residents and families knew PAS existed.
“We recorded an information video and sent out leaflets, but you were hoping and trusting that staff were going to see it. Did people know they could contact us in the early days? It’s hard to tell — we just kept going into lockdown.”
[Source: PAS Focus Group, 2026]
This experience reinforced PAS’s view that awareness of independent advocacy must be embedded systemically — not dependent on an organisation’s ability to physically enter a facility during a crisis. The Advocacy Matters report (October 2021) made the same point in the disability residential services context, concluding that access to advocacy support is essential to uphold rights and safeguard interests, and that a lack of information and safe spaces had impeded this during the pandemic. The lesson applies equally and urgently to nursing homes for older people.
6. Beyond Infection Control: Visiting Restrictions, Mental Health, and the Rights of Residents and Families
The visiting restrictions imposed on nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic represent one of the most significant interventions in the lives of older people and their families in the history of the State. This section examines their impact, drawing on all three evidence sources and on Ireland’s human rights obligations.
The purpose of this section is to ensure that any future framework governing similar decisions is more fully grounded in a comprehensive understanding of risk, one that includes the health risks of isolation and the rights of older people to dignity, family contact, and participation in decisions about their own lives.
The Physical and Mental Health Risks of Social Isolation
The evidence on the health impacts of social isolation in older people is substantial. Prolonged isolation is associated with accelerated cognitive decline, increased risk of depression and anxiety, deterioration of physical health, and increased mortality. These are documented clinical risks that, for frail and dependent older people in residential care, are as real and as serious as the risk of infection.
The Advocacy Matters report (October 2021) documented that visiting restrictions had a negative effect on the mental health of people in residential settings, resulting in isolation, loneliness, and anxiety, and found that restrictions failed to reflect HIQA’s human rights-based standards requiring services to support people to maintain personal relationships with family and others. While that report focused on people with disabilities rather than older people in nursing homes, the mental health consequences of enforced isolation are equivalent, and in many cases amplified for older people with dementia or other cognitive conditions who are particularly dependent on familiar relationships for their sense of safety and wellbeing.
The focus group echoed this, with advocates noting the lasting trauma experienced by families, and the near-universal view among those they worked with that they would have accepted personal risk in order to maintain contact with their relative.
The Rights Framework
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects the right to private and family life. Restrictions on this right must be necessary, proportionate, and accompanied by procedural safeguards. The visiting restrictions applied during the pandemic were, in many cases, blanket in nature, applied uniformly regardless of individual circumstances, without a mechanism for challenge or review, and in some cases in excess of what national guidelines actually required.
The UN Principles for Older Persons establish rights to independence, participation, and dignity that apply fully in residential care settings. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, provides relevant protection for residents living with dementia or other disabilities.
Consistency and the Nominated Support Person
As the focus group evidence established, the application of visiting restrictions was deeply inconsistent. Guidelines that included important safeguards were not consistently known or applied. Whether a family had access to these provisions depended not on what the guidelines said, but on whether the nursing home was implementing the most current version.
Looking Forward
Any future framework governing visiting restrictions must be grounded in a proportionality assessment accounting for the full range of health risks, including those arising from isolation, and must include individualised review mechanisms, nominated support person provisions from the outset, clear communication to residents and families, and a presumption in favour of contact. End-of-life visiting must be treated as a non-negotiable right, with facilities required to demonstrate how they will facilitate it rather than defaulting to prohibition.
7. Lessons for Future Preparedness
The COVID-19 pandemic was not the first occasion on which nursing homes faced an infectious disease outbreak. It was, however, the first occasion on which the scale and speed of an outbreak exceeded the capacity of the sector to respond.
Emergency Planning Must Be Developed With Stakeholders
National guidelines during the pandemic were developed centrally and communicated downward. The focus group evidence suggests that this approach produced guidance that was insufficiently grounded in the operational realities of nursing homes – the staffing ratios, the physical infrastructure, the actual capacity of facilities to implement what was being required of them. The NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission identified the same problem, noting a lack of clarity about governance responsibilities and operational inconsistencies as a result.
Future emergency planning must be developed with the meaningful involvement of nursing home staff, residents, families, HIQA, independent advocacy organisations, and people with lived experience of previous emergencies, including bereaved families. Guidelines developed in consultation with those who must implement and live with them are more likely to be realistic, more likely to be followed, and more likely to protect the rights of those affected.
Guidelines Must Reach Practice
The pandemic demonstrated that issuing guidelines is not the same as implementing them. A robust dissemination and monitoring system must sit alongside any future national framework — one that actively tracks whether updated guidance has reached facility level, supports homes struggling to implement requirements, and holds accountable those that do not.
Physical and Staffing Preparedness Must Be a Baseline Requirement
HIQA’s inspection framework should assess pandemic preparedness as a standing element of oversight.
Mandatory minimum staffing ratios for private nursing homes are required also. The absence of such ratios means there is no enforceable floor for safe staffing, and no baseline against which families and regulators can measure what a home is providing.
Medical Oversight Must Be Structured and Supported
Future emergency planning must address the gap between the clinical complexity of nursing home residents and the medical support available to staff, including clear escalation pathways, defined GP and specialist roles, and protocols that do not leave nursing staff carrying clinical decisions beyond their authority.
Independent Advocacy Must Be a Structural Entitlement
The experience demonstrated what independent advocacy could do in a crisis, and the limits of what it could do without structural embedding. Access to advocacy is essential to uphold rights during periods of crisis and that the lack of safe spaces and technology impeded this. In any future emergency, residents and families must know from the outset that independent advocacy exists, how to access it, and what it can do. Nursing homes, public and private must be required to communicate this proactively.
Learning Must Be Verified, Not Assumed
Any future emergency planning framework must include a mechanism for auditing whether recommendations from complaints and the lessons of previous emergencies have actually been implemented.
8. Analysis: Systemic Issues and Human Rights Implications
The themes emerging from all three evidence sources in this submission are not discrete operational failures. They reflect structural conditions in how long-term residential care for older people is governed, resourced, and understood in Ireland. COVID-19 did not create these conditions — it exposed and accelerated them, at enormous cost to residents, families, and staff.
8.1 The Rights of Older People in Residential Care
Ireland’s obligations under international human rights law were directly engaged by the pandemic experience of nursing home residents. Article 8 of the ECHR protects the right to private and family life; Article 13 provides for an effective remedy where rights are violated. The UN Principles for Older Persons establish rights to independence, participation, and dignity. The UNCRPD, guarantees the right to health and access to justice for disabled people, including many nursing home residents.
The Advocacy Matters report (October 2021) concluded that visiting restrictions in residential settings failed to reflect HIQA’s own human rights-based standards and that the rights of people do not change during a time of crisis. The same conclusion applies to older people in nursing homes.
8.3 The Medical Model Versus a Rights-Based Approach
A recurring theme across all three sources is the dominance of a purely medical model in the pandemic response, one that prioritised infection prevention as the singular objective, to the exclusion of other determinants of health and wellbeing. The Advocacy Matters report named this explicitly, noting that restrictions were not proportionate and balanced against the human rights of the person. A person-centred, rights-based approach consistent with the ADM Act 2015, UNCRPD principles, HIQA’s own human rights guidance, and the Sláintecare vision of integrated, person-centred care would have required explicit documentation of how residents’ rights were being balanced against infection control objectives, individualised review of restrictions, and active communication with residents and families as participants in their own care.
8.4 The Complaints System
Delays, inaccessibility, non-independent review mechanisms in private homes, and the structural impossibility of accountability when a nursing home can be sold mid-complaint these are systemic design flaws requiring systemic solutions.
9. Recommendations
PAS makes the following recommendations to Ireland’s COVID-19 Evaluation for consideration in its findings and in its recommendations to Government. These are grounded in our advocate focus group (2026), the NAS/PAS Oireachtas Submission (July 2020), the Advocacy Matters report (October 2021), and the human rights framework that must underpin any credible reform of long-term residential care.
9.1 Governance and Accountability
- Where nursing homes are identified through HIQA inspection as having persistent compliance failures, particularly in infection control, staffing, or care quality, a structured, supported improvement process must be initiated with powers of intervention where progress is inadequate.
9.2 Staffing and Physical Preparedness
4. Mandatory minimum staffing ratios for private nursing homes should be ia priority. These must specify minimum numbers of staff per resident.
5. All long-term residential care facilities should be required to maintain adequate stocks of infection control equipment as a standing regulatory requirement, subject to HIQA inspection. Pandemic preparedness, should be assessed as a routine element of oversight, not only in response to an emergency.
6. Structured and accessible medical oversight must be available to nursing homes, including defined GP and specialist input pathways and clear escalation protocols. This infrastructure must be part of any future emergency planning framework.
9.3 Communication and Transparency
7. A mandatory communication standard should be introduced for long-term residential care facilities, specifying minimum obligations to inform residents and families of outbreaks, changes in care arrangements, and deterioration.
8. Residents must be actively informed of changes to visiting arrangements and other matters affecting their daily lives. Facilities should be required to demonstrate how they communicate with residents as participants in their own lives.
9. Private nursing homes should be brought within a transparency framework equivalent to FOI for matters relating to care quality, complaints, and regulatory compliance, given the significant public funding received through the Fair Deal scheme.
9.4 Visiting Rights and the Balance of Health Risks
10. Any future public health framework governing restrictions on visiting in long-term residential care must be grounded in an explicit proportionality assessment accounting for the health risks of isolation, including cognitive decline, depression, and physical deterioration, alongside infection control objectives. Blanket restrictions without individualised assessment are inconsistent with Ireland’s human rights obligations under the ECHR and with HIQA’s human rights-based standards.
11. End-of-life visiting must be treated as a non-negotiable right in any future emergency framework. Facilities must demonstrate how they will facilitate family presence at end of life rather than defaulting to prohibition, and this must not be subject to staffing-dependent discretion.
12. The concept of a nominated support person or lead visitor, who can maintain contact with a resident even during restricted period, should be embedded in any future visiting restriction framework from the outset, with particular weight given to residents living with dementia or other conditions that make family contact essential to their wellbeing.
13. Future visiting restriction guidelines must be developed in consultation with nursing home operators, frontline staff, residents, families, and independent advocacy organisations, and must be accompanied by a clear, accessible public information campaign with a robust dissemination mechanism to ensure all facilities implement current guidance in real time.
9.5 Independent Advocacy and Complaints
14. There should be mandatory obligation on facilities to proactively inform residents and families of PAS’s existence, on admission, on an ongoing basis, and specifically in the context of any emergency or significant change in care arrangements.
10. Conclusion
PAS welcomes Ireland’s COVID-19 Evaluation and its commitment to a dedicated examination of the nursing home experience. For the residents who lived through the pandemic, for the families who were separated from them, for those who lost loved ones in circumstances of enforced isolation, and for the frontline staff who tried to provide safe and dignified care under conditions of extraordinary pressure, this Evaluation represents an opportunity for the truth of that experience to be formally heard and to shape lasting change.
The 53% increase in nursing home contacts to PAS in 2024, years after the pandemic, speaks to a sector in which the need for independent advocacy remains an integral part of public and private social care provision.
PAS remains committed to contributing to that process and welcomes the opportunity to engage further with the Evaluation panel, including through direct evidence from our advocates who have supported people during the pandemic.
Patient Advocacy Service 2025