What was the house of the renowned and remembered doctor Emilio Luque Moreno, located on the avenue that bears his name, in La Orotava, has since yesterday become the Villa del Carmen residence, the first convivial unit for the elderly on the island that It will be managed by the Divina Providencia fraternity.
With this resource, launched by the Social and Socio-Sanitary Care Institute (IASS), the Cabildo de Tenerife wants to implement a new personalized care model to improve the quality of care provided to users in which priority is given to the quality of life of these people, who have sufficient autonomy but for whom loneliness is their biggest problem.
The building, of large dimensions and located in the heart of the municipality, has capacity for 15 users although at the moment there are only 9 while the staff is made up of 12 workers who carry out different tasks.
“We must bet on this model and not on macro-centers and we are proud that they have bet on us and give us that confidence to manage this first center”, declared the managing director of the Foundation, the priest Julián Libreros Cabrera, during the inauguration.
The act was also attended by the president of the Cabildo, Pedro Martín; the island councilor for Social Action, Marián Franquet, and the councilor for Social Welfare of La Orotava, Belén González.
The latter advocated that the model to be followed by the different administrations “is to contribute to reducing macro-centres, betting on inclusive housing that offers a quality of life for the elderly”.
the new model
Pedro Martín spoke in the same vein, underlining that this first resource, the only one in Tenerife to date, “is an important experience because we want to work with a new model in which quality and not quantity prevail, as in the past, where the important thing was to build large buildings to put many people who were many years old with the aim of providing them with food or having a roof over their heads and nothing else mattered”.
On the contrary, the new approach promotes personalized attention, distributed homes in which users “not only feel like people who are turning years old, but first-class citizens, who, despite the fact that their capacity is not the same as in the past, continue to being valid”, declared Martín.
For her part, Marian Franquet emphasized the importance of all administrations following the same path to optimize resources and collaborate so that older people have a quality of life and addressed the users and workers of the center to tell them that “ they are opening a new way of understanding social resources, so that the quality of life of the people of Tenerife is better”.
The Villa del Carmen residence provides the elderly with personal autonomy so that, in addition to accommodation, maintenance and laundry, they are provided with support services in personal and social care, accompaniment and promotion for the integration and full life of the elderly in the community.
