The Ministry of Culture, Sports, Social Policies and Housing of the Government of the Canary Islands and the Prosecutor's Office will jointly inspect care centers for the elderly and people with disabilities, after the heads of both departments, Inés Rojas and Vicente Garrido, signed a collaboration agreement today regarding the protection of these residents in public and private centers.
"This agreement establishes a protocol that will ensure not only the care of users of centers and services for the elderly and people with disabilities, but also their legal security," said the Minister today, who stressed that the agreement "establishes administrative cooperation related to the authorization, registration, inspection and closure of centers and services for the care of the elderly and people with disabilities, both public and private."
Rojas stressed the importance of this agreement, "which has been worked on since the last legislature", since through it, "administrative cooperation is regulated for the realization, among other objectives, of joint inspections and exchange of information between the Prosecutor's Office of the Canary Islands and the Government of the Canary Islands, through the Vice-Ministry of Social Policies and Immigration".
Garrido stressed that the agreement "establishes the channels and mechanisms aimed at ensuring the effectiveness in the control of the management of centers, services and infrastructures with the ultimate aim of guaranteeing the well-being of these people".
Twenty centers closed in four years
According to Rojas, between 2006 and 2010, a total of 20 centers have been closed in the Canary Islands, "most of them for not complying with current regulations regarding the ordering, authorization, registration and inspection and system of sanctions of centers". One of those closures occurred in Lanzarote, with the controversial residence "Sol de Otoño", after the broadcast of a report from the program "Diario De".
During the press conference, Garrido stressed that "the vast majority of complaints do not come from families, but are the result of a routine and perfectly established work of the Inspection Services, both belonging to the Prosecutor's Office and belonging to the Vice-Ministry of Social Policies".
The Senior Prosecutor acknowledged that after the closure order of a center, "the difficult and most complicated thing is to relocate the residents, something in which sometimes there is opposition from their relatives".
Regarding the inspections carried out, Rojas indicated that, in the last two years, the Inspection Service dependent on her department has carried out a total of 68 inspections of centers.
ACN Press
