After the videos and photographs of the vexations and mockery to which some employees allegedly subjected the elderly residents of the Tías nursing home, managed by the private entity Amavir, testimonies have not stopped emerging, adding to the complaints. In addition to complaints about the material and staff deficiencies of this service, several family testimonies have come to light denouncing the treatment of their elderly relatives. This is the case of Rafael Hernández, whose father, already deceased, was in this day care residence from 2021 to 2024 and where his son saw how he arrived home with continuous urinary infections and numerous wounds.
According to what his son Rafael Hernández tells La Voz, at the beginning of attending the day residence everything was going very well until he began to have continuous urinary infections, to arrive home dirty and to lose weight. "I would ask and they would send me a report saying that he was eating well and that everything was going wonderfully, but it's true that I was seeing a deterioration despite the Alzheimer's he suffered from," he says.
For this reason, he began to suspect that at the day center they were not changing his diaper and decided to mark it to check if they were doing it or not. "When he arrived home in the afternoon he checked the diaper and saw that it had been the same, it was very urinated", he recounts. Despite complaining to the Residence Management that he was arriving home dirty, they attributed that dirt to the journey between the center and the family home, assuring that he was getting dirty along the way. "In fact, they had already operated on him to try to avoid those urine infections he had and in the end we discovered that it was something as simple as changing his diaper, something they were not doing", he points out.
On the other hand, Hernández also observed a lack of hygiene in his father. "He came with a dirty mouth and clothes, and they told me how well he ate by himself when that was a lie because my father was not able to pick up a spoon and put it in his mouth... only if you gave him a piece of bread he would take it to his mouth and eat it, but he couldn't coordinate a spoon," he points out.
In this regard, he assures that "the reports did not match reality and they even told me it was better not to bring my father to the center because he would fall asleep and they told me he was here as if he were sedated and they asked me if he wasn't sleeping at night, in addition, to telling me that for him to come like that it was better he didn't come".
After these problems, Rafael Hernández decided to request a meeting with the director, but his surprise was that when he arrived, there were six more people in the room besides the head of the center. They were some of the workers and "they were all on the other side of the table and I alone... in fact, when I entered that room I said: "I didn't know I had to bring a lawyer because that, for me, was a trap." In that meeting, he told the staff that if they were not prepared to care for dependent people, they should not do it.
A short time later, his father came home with medication that was not his in his pocket. It was a medication whose side effects caused weakness in the legs and drowsiness. "My father was not taking that medication and so I called the director and she told me she was going to look into it I'm going to look into it," she explains. For this reason, she criticizes the pharmaceutical management of the medication, since it is the center itself that is responsible for administering the pills to the elderly and that families send monthly. "You cannot let people with Alzheimer's have pills and I suspect they were giving that pill to my father even though they deny it," she says. And it is that after telling Amavir about this situation, his father started walking again and improved.
"The experience I have with them is that they try to solve the problems without much fuss, just that it stays between you and me and that's it, and they try to convince you not to go further", he/she continues.
Wounds on ears, chin and arms
The transport was another of the services in which Hernández had problems, especially with the driver of whom, according to her, Amavir was aware of his malpractice with the elderly. "The director admitted to me at the time that he was a conflictive person, that they had no way of firing him and that they were trying to", she indicates.
"This driver treated the elderly as if they were sacks of potatoes, in a hurry and rushing... in fact, my father had a couple of injuries caused by him, one of them, while taking him into the house, he scraped the wall with the chair and caused a quite significant bleeding wound on an arm", he recounts. "When my mother received him, she asked the driver and he said: "I don't know, they gave him to me like this and I'm leaving him here", he did nothing to heal it or to inquire about how he was", he continues.
On another occasion, his father arrived home with one of his ears bleeding. "He arrived with his ear burst and told me he hit himself with the van's window," he recounts. And the driver assured that the seat belts of the chair were broken and they were transporting the elderly without the floor anchors. After that, Hernández took his father to Emergencies where they made an injury report to which this media has had access where the suffered injury and where it occurred are reflected.
These were not the only incidents, as his father suffered a deep seven-centimeter wound on his chin while at the center. "A doctor called me, told me that my father had hit his chin and needed stitches, so he asked me to go pick him up to take him to the doctor," he recalls. At that moment, he told him to do it at the center itself with the healthcare staff, but the wound turned out to be more serious than what they were telling him. "He tells me that what is happening is that it looks bad, it seems to be a little more serious and he should be taken to the hospital for an X-ray, so I got very angry and asked him to call the ambulance himself... when I arrived, the bone was visible," he narrates.
After this very serious situation in the residence managed by Amavir came to light, Hernández recounts emotionally that his family and friends passed him the news but "he didn't have the stomach to open them".
His father was in the Tías day residence until April 2025, at which point he moved to the day residence of the Insular Hospital of Lanzarote. "They are wonderful, the change was brutal overnight and there they are very human and they give you all the information, it's another world", he concludes.