The generation of ‘baby boom’, people born between 1946 and 1964, will have an impact in the next decade on the dependency sector, which has been severely affected by underfinancing and has suffered severe structural deficits for years. According to a report made public today by the Catalan employers’ association ACRA (Catalan Association of Care Resources), in the next ten years 100,000 new professionals will be needed in residences to respond to the “accelerated aging” of the population – it is expected that the 80-year-old population will double – and to the new needs of the sector.
«We are tremendously concerned about the lack of professionals. If funding does not increase to be able to hire them in the next ten years, the sector will not be able to respond to the new needs and it would be the great failure of the welfare state,” the president of ACRA warns in statements to ABC, Easter Ribbon.
The president of the Union of Entities, Ramon Ramellsagrees with her, and remembers that “the shortage of professionals and the lack of financing occurs in a context of population aging that will put stress on the social and health sector with the arrival of the ‘baby boom’ generation.”
“In Catalonia alone, people aged 80 or over will go from the current 465,000 to more than one million, and many of them will need assistance resources such as residences, day centers, home help, telecare and flats with support,” he warns. Ramells.
The head of ACRA has highlighted that it is “key” to have professionals in the dependency sector, who are currently close to 700,000 people affiliated with Social Security related to dependency care, 311,177 of them in residential establishments.
In this sense, he has recognized that there is an underground economy in the long-term care sector and has been in favor of “regularize” the situation of caregivers because “the people who care are necessary and they also have to be well cared for.”
In its study, ACRA urges to allocate more resources to a “precarious” sector – that of residences and home help for dependent people – with low salaries and a heavy workload. The latest international statistics confirm this. Spain It is below the European average in terms of public investment in the sector. Currently, it invests 0.96% of GDP in long-term care (basically in residences), still far from the 1.5% average of the countries in the region. OECDa classification led by the Netherlands (3.1%), Norway (2.9%) and Sweden (2.83%). “We must reach 2% of GDP in dependency for greater coverage and an improvement in waiting lists,” said Cinta Pascual.
«We are below the European average and very far from countries like Holland, Netherlands or Luxembourg, which are at much higher funding levels. We need more financing to be able to have quality infrastructure and make more laws that support new needs,” Pascual warns in statements to this newspaper. He also demands that the current legal framework be modified because “the last law is already 14 years old.”
A total of 393,581 residential places
Low salaries, excessive workloads, the physical and mental consequences of the stage of Covid-19 and the discredit that the sector has suffered are, according to ACRA, some of the reasons for this structural deficit, “a situation that has led companies and unions to request salary harmonization in the public and subsidized residential sector, a measure that “It has the support of the main political formations, but it has not yet been materialized, or even planned.”
Spain has an offer of 393,581 residential places and 105,447 daytime places, with a 73% of privately owned residential spaces and, specifically, Catalonia offers 62,000 residential places and 20,000 daytime places, with 85% private ownership, and will need 25,000 more places in residences in the next decade, reports Ep.
Given the aging of the population expected until 2036, the report estimates that it will be necessary to create between 11,396 annual places to maintain current coverage and 23,461 to reach the European average.
Average resolution time: 324 days
The ‘Socioeconomic study of care for people in a situation of dependency in Spain’ also reveals that although the number of beneficiaries of the Individual Care Program (PIA) has grown in recent years with an annual average of 6%, the average resolution time for the benefit is 324 days and the waiting list is 155,000 people.
In Catalonia, the average time in 2023 from the application for the agency to the resolution of the benefit is 295 days and the waiting list to be a beneficiary of the PIA is the “highest” in Spainwith 48,470 dependent people. He System for Autonomy and Dependency Care (Saad) represented public spending of 10,253 million euros in 2022, 74% financed by the autonomous communities and 26% by the State.
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