Relatives In Spanish Care Homes May Not Be Able To Choose Their Own Bed Time

Ask a Spanish care home whether it has a personalised care plan for your relative and the answer is almost certainly yes. Ask whether that plan means they choose their own bedtime and, according to new figures, there’s a good chance it doesn’t. 

Nine in 10 care homes say they have a personal plan

Spain has published its second full count of residential care centres, and for the first time it used the same standard everywhere rather than letting each region measure things its own way. The Ministry of Social Rights, Consumo y Agenda 2030 (Spain’s social affairs ministry), through Imserso (the Institute for the Elderly and Social Services), counted 7,893 centres between homes for older people and homes for people with disabilities, and asked every one of them how they run day to day.

Nine in 10 said they had a personalised care plan for each resident. On paper, that sounds like exactly the individual attention families hope for when they choose a home. In practice, according to the same figures, it doesn’t always stretch as far as when someone goes to bed. 

Just under half let residents choose their bedtime

Only 46.9 per cent of centres said residents could decide for themselves when to go to bed and get up. In the rest, that call is made for the whole home rather than left to the individual, whatever their own habits might be.

It’s an easy detail to overlook when weighing up a care home, where the assumption is usually ‘of course you’d still get to live by your own routine, just with more support around you’. These figures suggest that isn’t always the case, and the gap between having a written plan and actually letting someone choose their own hours is exactly where families’ expectations and reality can part ways. 

It’s worth being clear what the census measures, too. The figures come from centres describing their own policies, not from residents describing what their days are really like, so a home that ticks the box for flexibility on paper could still fall short of it in practice. Officials have also said this second count isn’t directly comparable with the first from 2024, since both the methodology and the centres included have changed.

Restraints, pets and shared rooms tell a similar story

The rest of the census paints a similar picture of a sector still working towards full personal choice rather than delivering it everywhere. Three in four centres say they have a plan to phase out physical or mechanical restraints, and just over half allow residents to keep a pet, though that figure drops sharply in publicly run centres compared with private ones.

Fewer than half of residents have a room to themselves, with shared bedrooms still the norm across both elderly and disability centres. Ownership matters too, with nearly two in three elderly residences privately owned and run, and the rest split between public ownership and centres that are publicly owned but privately managed. 

The census follows a bigger shift in how Spain cares for elderly people 

This count lands only a week after Congress approved Spain’s biggest overhaul of dependency and disability law in 20 years, a reform aimed squarely at people cared for at home rather than in residential settings. That law lets home carers accompany someone to appointments, combines previously separate services and allows friends or neighbours to be paid as informal carers, but it says nothing about what happens once someone actually moves into a home.

Rosa Martínez, Spain’s Secretary of State for Social Rights, said the point of the census wasn’t to grade individual homes but to finally see the sector clearly. “You cannot transform what you do not know,” she said, arguing that a shared national standard was overdue after years of each region measuring what it could, however it could.

What to ask before choosing a home

There’s no way to check a specific home’s real routine from a national spreadsheet, so the most reliable option is still to ask directly, and specifically, rather than accepting a general reassurance about “personalised care”.

The questions that are most important to ask before signing anything:

• Do residents choose their own bedtime and wake-up time, or does the home run one fixed schedule for everyone?
• Does that answer change for residents who need more support, or who share a room?
• How often and when are visits allowed, and does that change at short notice? 
• Can residents keep their own belongings, furniture or a pet in their room?
• How is a personalised care plan actually put into daily practice, rather than just written down?

A written care plan is a start, not proof, so the safest way to know how a home really runs is still to ask before signing anything, not after a relative has already moved in.

See also: Families caring for elderly parents in Spain say Brexit has left them with impossible choices and Understanding live-in home care, for families weighing up alternatives to residential care.