In Italy, residential care facilities, active at 31st December 2010, are 12,808 with 424,705 beds (7 for every 1,000 residents). Compared with 2009 no significant changes are observed.
The majority of the residential care facilities provide both social and health care services, the 72% of beds. They mainly provide services to non-independent elderly. The rest of the facilities (28%) provide only social care.
The huge geographical differences remained unchanged from the previous year: 66% of all residential care beds were in the regions of the North, with a rate of 10 beds for every 1,000 residents. In the South the rate was just 3 beds per thousand residents.
The greatest supply of both health and social residential care services was in the North, with 8 beds for every 1,000 residents versus 2 beds per thousand residents in the South.
The residential care recipients were 394,374. Around 295,000 of them were elderly people aged 65 and over (75%), while just over 80,000 were adults aged between 18 and 64 (20%), and approximately 19,000 were minors aged under 18 (5%).
Half of the elderly recipients were aged over 85, while 74% of them were non independent. The sex ratio was highly unbalanced: of the approximately 295,000 elderly recipients, over 220,000 were women.
61% of adult recipients aged 18-64 were men. The main difficulty was connected with disability or psychiatric disorders (around 69% of the adult recipients).
57% of recipients aged fewer than 18 had no specific problem, 25% had problems related to substance abuse and 16% had mental health problems or disabilities.
Almost half of recipients aged under 18 (47%) live in residential care facilities as a result of family-related problems.
Just over 14,000 of recipients aged fewer than 18 were released from residential care facilities during 2010. Half of them were placed with an adoptive or foster family.
Foreign residential care recipients were 16,023 (4% of all guests). 59% of them were adults (3 for every 1,000 adult foreign residents), 35% were minors aged under 18 (6 for every 1,000 foreign residents aged under 18) and only 6% were elderly (1 for every 1,000 elderly foreign residents).
70% of residential care facilities belong to the private sector. Over two thirds of them were run directly by the owners.
Public owners, that do not directly run the residential facilities, entrust most frequently the management, in the North to other public-sector institutions (in 53% of cases). In the centre and in the southern regions the same owners entrust the management mainly to private institutions (in 54% and 83% of cases respectively).