Valldoriolf Specialist Day Care Centre

The Specialist Day Care Centre (CAE) offers personalised care to people with serious disabilities so they can achieve the highest possible level of personal autonomy and social integration. It also encourages a range of group activities which people choose depending on their preferences.

It provides the appropriate support so people can live in line with their life project and achieve good interaction with their surroundings, promoting social inclusion and the exercise of the users’ rights as citizens. Support is offered to families or guardians in relation to the user of the day care service.

Facilities

The Valldoriolf Specialist Day Care Centre is fully integrated into the Valldoriolf home, built on a flat site measuring 2,700 m2 on a 5 ha property belonging to FVO.

At the main entrance there is a large entrance hall for multiple uses, including reception, technical service offices, meeting room, toilets, medical service and infirmary, pharmacy and areas intended for day care service or specialised activities: physiotherapy room, sensory stimulation room, multimedia room and the processing and beauty products workshop room (the last four lead into the garden).

Then there is the central corridor that running to the end of the building and separating the residents’ area from general services (machine room, maintenance workshop, staff room, laundry, kitchen and staff changing rooms).

The laundry and cleaning service is run by the Foundation’s Xavier Quincoces Special Work Centre and the catering service, subcontracted to the company RC Serveis, has a kitchen in the centre’s facilities. A team of two people with disabilities from the Special Work Centre are included in the kitchen staff. The menus are drawn up and revised each month by the centre’s nursing service.

The spaces devoted to everyday living consist of three units with the same distribution and composition: a corridor separates the bedrooms on the left from the bathrooms and living rooms on the right.

Units A and B have a living area with television and video. At the end of the corridor is the office and the large dining room.

History

One of the initial aims of the County Association for Parents of People with Learning Difficulties was to offer a residential service for people with severe learning difficulties in Granollers and the county. The service was intended to house people who, for various reasons, could not receive the care they needed in their own family environment. To make this project happen, the association’s management board began contacts with the Government of Catalonia’s Minister for Social Welfare Antoni Comas i Balldellou to suggest the construction of a home for people with serious learning difficulties. After several meetings, the proposal was taken up by the minister, once the process for carrying out the project had been approved. Among the agreements, the association pledged to assign the property where the home and day centre were to be built to the Catalan Care and Social Services Institute (ICASS) – now the Office for Social Inclusion and Promotion of Personal Autonomy (SISPAP) – of the Department of Social Welfare.

The general meeting held by the association on 10 February 1990 unanimously adopted the agreement to “assign to the Catalan Institute for Care and Social Services (ICASS) of the Government of Catalonia 15,812.5 m2 in the north of the property within the municipality of Roca del Vallès, belonging to this management board, to be used to build a centre for people with severe learning difficulties under the following conditions: the assignment will be for a period of 99 years provided it is used for the care of people with learning difficulties, and people from the county of Vallès Oriental will have preference for admission”.

Construction work then began, to be completed in the summer of 1994. While the work was going on, the Vallès Oriental Private Foundation for people with Learning Difficulties (FVO) was set up by the unanimous wish of the County Association for Parents of People with Learning Difficulties, which assigned the foundation all its assets, including the property where ICASS was given the rights to build the home and specialist day care centre.

The new centre, built on a flat site measuring 2,700 m2, came into operation on 5 October 1994 and was opened on 26 November that year by the minister Antoni Comas.

The centre is entered in the Register of Social Services Organisations, Services and Establishments of the Government of Catalonia’s Social Welfare Department with the number F-13,022. The property and movable goods inside the centre belong to SISPAP (formerly ICASS) but it is managed by the FVO, which was awarded the contract to run the centre under a public tender process on 25 July 1994.