"I don't think there is a will to want to be cruel, but it's a whole system of profitability that has been put in place which means that there is even unconscious mistreatment" analyzes Olivia Mokiejewski, journalist and president of the Collective 9471 association, which brings together more than 350 families whose relatives died of Covid in an nursing home and were sometimes victims of abuse.
Since the creation of his association in 2020, when 9,471 deaths linked to Covid-19 were officially recorded in nursing homes, numerous complaints have followed one another, with “similar stories” to those mentioned in the investigation book “Les Gravediggers”, published at the end of January 2022, which tells the story behind the Orpea group.
“This book is very important and I hope it will change things, but that's what people have been saying for a long time.
Everyone is a little as if he fell from his chair but many politicians knew.
And the risk after such an investigation is that everyone hides behind Orpea when it is not necessarily better in other groups, whether public or private.
Read alsoEXCLUSIVE - Scandal in nursing homes: Korian, the giant of the sector, in turn implicated by families
Rationing of changes, terrible meals, lack of staff to ensure that residents have eaten well, lack of medical follow-up, lack of communication with families... The stories that the director lists are numerous and often similar.
“The problem is that when you ask questions, you come across as the pain in the ass.
So after a while you avoid disturbing because you wonder how your loved one will be treated next.
“Families want answers to honor the memory of their deceased loved ones”
Olivia Mokiejewski
Olivia Mokiejewski, daughter of director Jean-Pierre Mocky, who died in 2019, herself lost her 96-year-old grandmother, who died of Covid, while she was living in the Ehpad Bel-Air, belonging to the group Korian, located in Clamart (Hauts-de-Seine).
“We were not allowed to visit him because of the Covid.
I could call him in video and I heard from him every day.
I could see that her condition was deteriorating and when I called the team, they told me she was fine.
I was not alerted to her condition as she lay dying.
I filed a complaint for failure to assist a person in danger, endangering the life of others and manslaughter.
Since then, a judicial investigation has been underway.
Other families have not reached this stage, for lack of evidence.
"Justice must take up all these cases and condemn the culprits so that this impunity ends" and recalls that all the families who file a complaint "are not seeking revenge but a response to what may have happened, to honor the memory of their deceased loved ones.
The fear of the association?
That this "media hype" is only a "passing buzz" when "all this is only the beginning of the scandal", according to Olivia Mokiejewski, and that these families, as well as the caregivers who are also members of the association, are able to propose concrete solutions.
