In Italy, residential care facilities, active at 31st December 2011, are 12,033 with 386,803 beds (6.5 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 74% of beds. They mainly provide services to non-independent elderly. The rest of the facilities (26%) provide only social care.
The huge geographical differences remained unchanged from the previous year: 67% of all residential care beds were in the regions of the North, with a rate of 9,5 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 369,523. Around 279,000 of them were elderly people aged 65 and over (76%), approximately 73,000 were adults aged between 18 and 64 (20%), and while just over 17,000 were minors aged under 18 (5%).
Half of the elderly recipients were aged over 85, while 75% of them were non independent. The sex ratio was highly unbalanced: of the approximately 279,000 elderly recipients, over 209,000 were women.
For information:
Disability and social integration
Alessandro Solipaca
ph. +39 06 4673.7581
solipaca@istat.it
Claudia Di Priamo
ph. +39 06 4673.7310
dipriamo@istat.it