Omar, in his 50s, reportedly squeezed the 88-year-old patient's breasts and asked her if she had milk in them.

Omar Alabiadi, assigned by the municipality to do home care service, arrived in Sweden in 2012 and was granted Swedish citizenship in 2019. The elderly woman claims that she was harassed by the man during the time he spent in the couple’s home.

The woman feels that Alabiadi was intrusive and personal rather than professional in looking after her. She claims that the Syrian man started to talk about her breasts first. Shortly afterwards, Alabiadi allegedly hugged the woman and pulled up her dress. According to the police investigation, Alabiadi squeezed the woman’s breasts and nipples, and asked her if she had any milk in her breasts. Subsequently, the woman told her son about the incident, who reported Omar Alabiadi to the police, as well as to the head of the municipality’s home care service.

Karoline Mindal-Wejlemot, head of the home care service, told the police that Alabiadi had been suspended from work for the police investigation. She also pointed out that when she asked the man about the incident, he said that he had touched the old lady’s breasts only once.

The 88-year-old woman told the police that she was shocked by the incident and that she did not feel safe in her own home.

As reported by V4NA, this was not the first time that elderly people have suffered abuse committed by social workers with an immigrant background in Sweden. Not long ago, three people were suspended from their jobs after they had left a resident in a care home on his own, lying in his faeces. A report on the case revealed that the staff of the care home had been in the room but failed to help the elderly person for several hours, although they were clearly aware of his condition.

Swedish nursing homes struggling with severe labour shortages recruit immigrants to work at these institutions. Several of these homes reported problems because the immigrants do not want to work and refuse to learn Swedish. Immigrants probably only take such jobs in order to qualify for state benefits.

However, it is the residents of elderly homes who have to suffer the consequences, deprived of the high-quality of care they were accustomed to. More and more scandals erupt, revealing that immigrants in Swedish nursing homes fail to do their duties.

It came to light recently that residents in an elderly home in the town of Umea are being terrorised by immigrants ever since the institution abolished requirements for the possession of Swedish language skills and qualifications.

According to the Swedish press, the elderly are terrorised in a variety of ways by migrant staff members when they have no patience for elderly care. One of the punishments they have inflicted is forcing nursing home residents to sleep in their own excrement because they refused to change their bedpans or nappies. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, with many other complaints from the elderly in their care. The staff are impatient, irritable, especially towards people with dementia, they do not understand their job and it is impossible to communicate with them because they do not understand Swedish.

In many cases, migrants who do not want to work do not even take care of the elderly people’s medication, and at other times they do not help them with bathing, leaving them in the shower or on the toilet instead.

Language barriers mean that there is regular tensions between migrants and the elderly under their care. The language ombudsman is not a new phenomenon in the health and social care sector in Helsingborg, but the programme is now being launched on a larger scale, putting at least one language assistant in each of the municipality’s 60 or so health and social care units – many of which are homes for the elderly and disabled – by the end of the year.

Their task is to support immigrants working in health and social care who cannot communicate in Swedish.

There are many jobs in the health and social care sector that require knowledge of Swedish. Even more general communication with patients and their relatives requires at least a basic knowledge of Swedish. However, the language requirement has recently been ignored, citing labour shortages, and vacant posts have been filled by migrants who not only lack Swedish language knowledge, but are also unqualified.

This is why Helsingborg and many other municipalities have come up with the idea of language assistants. Florenta Ganios, one of the language representatives, told state television that the extra burden was hard to get used to. Many people who don’t speak Swedish don’t ask for help, but hide their lack of language skills, and the quality of their work deteriorates.

The real problem, according to Florenta, is that people who do not speak Swedish well enough are employed, and this will not change with the current measure. On the contrary, it may encourage health care providers to employ more people who do not know the language. „It’s bad that they hire staff who don’t speak Swedish, because it makes the patients feel unsafe”.

And Lars Thunberggel, chairman of the health care services board, admitted that language deficiencies among health workers are now a serious problem. But he said that this problem would have to temporarily be put on the back burner because of the priority of getting as many newcomers into jobs as soon as possible.