Policy Podemos proposes deprivatizing all residences and hiring relatives of dependent people as professional caregivers

Podemos wants to deprivatize all nursing homes and hire relatives of dependent people as if they were professional caregivers

Policy Podemos proposes deprivatizing all residences and hiring relatives of dependent people as professional caregivers

Podemos wants to deprivatize all nursing homes and hire relatives of dependent people as if they were professional caregivers. It is one of the proposals included in the framework program for the regional and municipal elections of the next 28-M.

In a text of barely 41 pages but very detailed in the care part, the purple training seeks to wink at the older population and dependents (one and a half million people) and amend the mismanagement of nursing homes during the Covid-19 crisis. To this end, it undertakes to approve a new law on the quality of the care system to establish minimum parameters for the provision of services. For example, regarding the minimum size of the buildings "to avoid depersonalized macrocenters", the ratios of professionals per users, the salary tables (with "no salary below 1.5 times the interprofessional minimum wage") and the labor rights of caregivers.

It also contemplates that the Autonomous Administration can hire a member or several members of a family to carry out the tasks of assisting the dependent person with working conditions comparable to those of professional assistance. This possibility would be done "as a second option", since in the first place it proposes to provide coverage "as a priority" through professionalized personal assistance at home.

Its objective is that "all dependent people have covered all the hours of assistance they need throughout the day, fully paid for by public funds", for which regional dependency financing will have to be increased considerably.

If none of these solutions is possible, Podemos has thought of a third way, as a "last resort": a residential place with full coverage "with quality parameters".

He defends that this order of priorities is "especially important to guarantee assistance in emptied Spain", where, he explains, the distance between the residential center and the habitual home of the dependent person can be much greater.

For this, it proposes a "process of deprivatization of the residence system with the horizon that its management is 100% public and direct." For this he will establish, first of all, "the prohibition of signing new concerts, new agreements and new outsourcing with the private sector."

In addition, all contracts that are expiring will immediately revert to public control." For the incorporation into the public system of each specific center, there will be at least two options: either the private owner of the center whose contract is about to expire agrees to sell the facilities to the Administration at a price according to an independent appraisal Or, in case there is no such agreement within one year of expiration, the Administration must build an equivalent infrastructure in the vicinity of the original one.

The program details that, if the commitment to home care reduces the need for residential centers, the center will be closed at the expiration of an agreement without replacement by other places. And it also contemplates "immediately deprivatizing by paying the just price" all private or subsidized residences that "seriously and repeatedly" fail to comply with the parameters of the new law.

According to a 2020 CSIC study on the network of nursing homes, 73.2% of residences in Spain are private. There are several communities that exceed that average percentage.

The electoral program is very much in the line of prohibiting everything private or concerted. In this sense, it proposes a moratorium for the establishment of new educational agreements in compulsory and post-compulsory education, another indefinite moratorium and non-renewal of agreements with large companies for infant education from 0 to 3 years of age, and a third moratorium on the granting of new licenses for the private university.

It also proposes an "absolute moratorium" on health, new concerts with the private sector, the creation of public supermarkets that compete with the big chains, a real estate agency, a bank and a public energy company, the deprivatization of services such as cleaning, garbage collection, water management, funeral homes and home help.

At the same time, it offers free transport and university, a new minimum income compatible with employment of 700 euros per month per person and an additional 100 euros for each child up to 18 years of age.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project