It is the denunciation of a system made to make the residents and their families “spit”: elderly people “rationed”, abandoned in their excrement or left without care for days... The publication of an investigative book titled "Les Fossoyeurs", criticizing the obsession with profitability within the private group of retirement homes Orpea, had an immediate echo.
This Monday, the company experienced a sharp drop in its price on the Paris Stock Exchange.
The title of the French group, manager of private clinics and retirement homes, lost more than 16%, before its listing was suspended, at the request of the company.
The management of Orpea ended up speaking out at the start of the evening via a press release.
“An article published today in the newspaper Le Monde reveals the first elements of a work to be published targeting Orpea.
These elements, controversial and aggressive, show a clear desire to harm.
We formally contest all of these accusations, which we consider to be false.
"Orpea, not having the book to date, has already seized its lawyers to take all the necessary steps, including on the legal level, in order to restore the truth of the facts and defend its honor", have-- they communicated.
But what does “Les Fossoyeurs” say for such an earthquake to affect the hospital group?
The author, journalist Victor Castanet, describes a system where hygiene care, medical care, and even residents' meals are "rationed" to improve the company's profitability.
And this while stays are billed at the high price of several thousand euros per month.
A carer, whose testimony the author collected, recounts, for example, how much she had to "fight to obtain protection" for the residents.
“It must spit!
»
“We were rationed: it was three diapers a day maximum. And not one more. It doesn't matter that the resident is sick, that he has gastro, that there is an epidemic. Nobody wanted to know anything”, says this woman in “Les Fossoyeurs”. The author is first interested in the excesses reported in the establishment "Les Bords de Seine
"
which
serves as a showcase for the Orpea group, in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), then discovers other malfunctions.
According to the author, the obsession with profitability would have pushed the historical leaders of the group – beginning with its founder, Doctor Jean-Claude Marian, today extremely wealthy honorary president –, to impose managerial methods aimed mainly at cut back on spending and also take advantage of public money.
“It must spit!
», would be the « leitmotif » of management meetings according to this controversial book.
The book also looks back on the conditions of the death of the writer Françoise Dorin in January 2018, following a badly treated bedsore, less than three months after her entry into one of the establishments of the Orpea group.
A search had already taken place at the headquarters of the group of health homes in Puteaux (Hauts-de-Seine) last March, as part of a preliminary investigation for complicity in tax evasion and aggravated money laundering.
The stock market storm triggered by the publication of this work also affected other private groups managing retirement homes: the Korian share lost some 10% in the course of the afternoon, and that of LNA health more than 4 % - in a market globally down very sharply by 3.55%.
