Elderly homes or residential institutions for the elderly do not have sufficient staff to care for this category.
While the standard is for each caregiver to have no more than five elderly persons, this is difficult to achieve under current conditions.
A report from the Albanian Supreme Audit Institution, which has audited these residential institutions precisely, has reached this conclusion. According to data, the number of elderly people in these institutions ranges from 40 to 65 individuals, and the biggest difficulty lies in the fact that some of them are chronically ill.
“The number of employees providing social services in all centers is insufficient, even considering that many of these centers have many elderly people who are chronically ill and unable to care for themselves. One of the difficulties for staff is the lack of space and access to perform the service according to standards, including the lack of an elevator in the centers of Tirana, Gjirokastra, Kavaja, Fier, as well as shared toilets in all centers, which hinder the service for elderly paraplegic or tetraplegic individuals. Therefore, in order to improve the quality of social services for the elderly, an increase in their number is needed,” the report states.
Another noticeable element from the audit is the lack of psychologists or social workers. According to the report, the State Social Service has been requested to develop a methodology that enables the monitoring of these residential institutions, which has not been continuous until now and does not provide a clear picture of the situation. In these centers, it is also required that the offered infrastructure be suitable and similar to home, but according to findings, this infrastructure appears to be very weak in some cases.
“It was found that in some cases, the buildings and infrastructure of residential institutions were weak and needed investment since they did not meet the standards of social care services for the elderly in residential centers.
In most cases, the elderly were accommodated in living rooms composed of 3 or 4 persons. According to the manual for implementing standards, sleeping rooms should be organized with a usable area of 12 m² when accommodating two persons (beds) and 18 m² for rooms with three beds. In no case are rooms with 4 beds foreseen, and residential institutions have not always taken into consideration the necessary space for accommodating an elderly person,” the audit says.
For a series of encountered problems, the Supreme State Audit Institution has recommended that measures be taken by the institutions.
The social care system for the elderly in Albania consists of public and non-public residential institutions. Public elderly homes are located in Tirana, Shkodra, Kavaja, Fier, Gjirokastra, Poliçan. There is also the Daily Polyvalent Center in Kamëz, the Daily Polyvalent Center in Sarandë, and several non-public residential treatment centers for the elderly.
Currently, only two of the residential institutions for the elderly (Tirana, Shkodra) are under the administration of the State Social Service, while four other residential institutions have passed into the administration and dependency of the respective Local Government Units.
