The response of the public authorities to the situation in nursing homes is "not up to par", while reports for "abuse" and "violations of rights" are on the rise, denounces the Defender of Rights this Sunday.
France has 7,500 retirement homes.
“We are still seeing violations of the rights of residents in nursing homes (…).
The response of the public authorities is not up to the attacks denounced, nor the urgency, ”estimates in an interview with the JDD.
fr Claire Hédon.
Families seem more and more inclined to denounce the dysfunctions that affect their close residents.
This certainly explains the increase in reports: "The Defender of Rights had investigated more than 900 complaints in connection with the elderly in nursing homes during the six years preceding the 2021 report. We have received 281 more since then", details such as Claire Hédon.
“9% of our recommendations resulted in an action”
The Defender of Rights is preparing to publish the follow-up report on the 64 recommendations issued in May 2021, during the Covid crisis.
"Eighteen months after the first report, the results are extremely worrying: 9% of our recommendations have resulted in action, 55% have been announced but are struggling to materialize, and 36% remain unanswered," laments the former president of ATD Fourth World.
And the shortcomings observed, both in the private and in the public sector, represent in 43% of the cases of "ill-treatment", in 30% of the "limitations of visits", and in 12% of the "restrictions on the freedom to go and to come ".
A year ago, the book "Les Fossoyeurs" was released, which revealed the extent of the savings organized in certain Ehpad d'Orpea on the backs of residents, and in a few days a pocket edition will appear in a version enriched with ten chapters by its author Victor Castanet.
After the scandal, the government launched in July a plan to control all nursing homes within two years, when they were only subject to one every twenty to thirty years.
Read alsoScams and small schemes of private nursing homes: 50% of pinned establishments
In the newspaper Ouest-France, on December 8, the Minister of Solidarity and Autonomy Jean-Christophe Combe assured that 1,400 inspections had been carried out between February and December 2022, including 400 physical checks “targeting nursing homes for which we had encountered difficulties.
These 1,400 inspections gave rise, according to the ministry, to more than 100 recommendations, 650 prescriptions, 200 injunctions and 7 referrals to the public prosecutor.
Checks… remotely
But according to a group of inspectors stationed in regional health agencies, quoted by Le Canard Enchaîné on Wednesday, only 700 checks were made.
A number more in line with the 600 checks claimed by Combe on October 26, when presenting the expenditure component of the Social Security finance bill to parliamentarians.
Worse, according to the Duck, 80% of the checks are carried out remotely, once the directors of the retirement homes have filed documents on an electronic platform.
But “we cannot detect abuse on paper”, stormed an inspector in the weekly.