There are hundreds of empty beds in the capital region alone, even though the need for care is dire.
12 empty room. It’s a real-time situation at Attendo’s nursing home in Harmaaniity, Espoo. Even yesterday there were 13 empty rooms, or care places, but today Harmaaniitty received one new resident.
The need for care is dire, but the positions cannot be filled because there are no qualified staff. In Harmaaniitti, more than one in five beds lie unused.
“There are currently 72 vacant places in Attendo’s enhanced service housing in Espoo, 64 in Vantaa and nine in Helsinki”, confirms Attendo’s communication.
In some units, even entire floors have had to be closed, says Attendo’s director of customer experience, responsibility and communications Susanna Paloheimo.
“Vantaa Airport has two empty floors. The situation is really difficult for everyone and the human distress of the elderly who need care is really great,” says Paloheimo.
Residents photographed at the nursing home in Harmaaniity in December 2022. There is no overcrowding, because due to the labor shortage, more than one-fifth of the nursing home’s rooms are empty.
Readings are barren everywhere else too. There are about 450 empty nursing home places in the Uusimaa area alone with companies, according to the data of the Hyvinvointiala Hali ry, which represents the private social and health sector.
In Esperi Care’s eight housing service unit locations in Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa, about 40 are vacant.
“The reason is simply that we haven’t been able to recruit personnel. Until a couple of years ago, the problem was rather that there were places, but no visitors,” says the regional manager of Uusimaa Marjut Rantanen Esper’s services for the elderly.
So it is not necessarily possible to go to a nursing home even in urgent cases, but the elderly are placed, for example, in hospital emergency rooms.
HS has told about the difficult situation of emergency rooms several times in the past few days.
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Geriatric the distress is also visible on the public side, says the director of the northern service area Riina Lilja From the city of Helsinki.
“At the moment, there are 43 places in care units in Helsinki due to the closure decision. Two units are completely closed. As a phenomenon, this is really worrying, and the situation has worsened during this year,” says Lilja.
Brackets mean empty beds.
Next in 2018, the rationing of nurses will become even tighter: according to the law, by April 1st, there must be at least 0.65 nurses on shift for each client, and by December 1st, 0.7 nurses.
This worries Lilja.
“It means that an already scarce resource is allocated to treating even fewer people.”
“The situation will get even worse”, predicts Rantanen as well.
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