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Hesse acts to recruit Spanish carers

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Hesse acts to recruit Spanish carers
Photo: DPA

The central German state of Hesse is making active attempts to recruit unemployed workers from Spain look after the state's elderly people.

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The state's social affairs minister, Stefan Grüttner said on Saturday that in the first phase of the programme, around 100 positions in Marburg, Offenbach and Wiesbaden would be filled with workers from the Madrid region.

The Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper reported on Monday that Grüttner and the state's economy minister Florian Rentsch would be travelling to Spain next week to talk with people there about getting Spanish workers to come to Germany.

The state's social welfare ministry also wants to make qualifications achieved abroad more easily recognized in Hesse.

Members of state's Green Party said the initiative would not be enough to solve the problem of insufficient carers for the elderly and that the career needed to be made more attractive to local people.

They also said it was crucial for a programme to be established to help the recruited carers communicate with the people they are looking after.

New unemployment figures from Spain on Monday show a record 4.8 million unemployed. The country's federal employment office in Madrid reported that in October, an additional 130,000 people registered as being unemployed, bringing the October numbers up 10.8 percent on that month the year before.

As the number of senior citizens in Germany grows, so does the need for carers. From 1999 to 2009 the number of those employed in nursing homes nationwide grew by 41 percent, according to the federal Health Ministry. Experts expect those numbers to continue rising in the coming decades.

DPA/The Local/mbw

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