While the government announced a control plan for nursing homes, the president of the National Federation of Associations and Friends of the Elderly and their Families (Fnapaef), Claudette Brialix, wonders about the effectiveness of the measures.
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“We doubt” that the government is effectively applying the measures announced for the controls of nursing homes, reacted on franceinfo Claudette Brialix, president of the National Federation of Associations and Friends of the Elderly and their Families (Fnapaef), while the government announced on Tuesday March 8 a “extensive control plan for 7,500 nursing homes in two years” to prevent abuse.
If Claudette Brialix recognizes that these measures will “in a good way”she believes that “Ie all is to know if they will be followed by an effective realization”. The announcements come in the wake of the scandal created by the publication of the investigative book The Gravediggers by Victor Castanet. She wonders about “suites” which will be given to the controls.
franceinfo: Are the government announcements going in the right direction?
Claudette Brialix: These announcements are definitely going in the right direction. The whole thing is to know if they will be followed by an effective realization. We are scalded. Let’s not forget that we are in an election campaign. Victor Castanet’s book came out at a favorable time linked to the electoral campaign. Everything that we seem to discover, we have been talking about for more than twenty years. Will this be followed by effective measures? This means sufficient staff in the ARS to carry out checks. How will these checks be done? What follow-up will we give to it? Checks were already rare, but when the reports revealed serious and consistent malfunctions, how many measures were not taken months later? You don’t have to hide your face. We will ask the ARS to note the insufficiency of the means that they themselves were not authorized to give since they were not given any.
Do you fear an announcement effect?
Yes, we doubt. We believed in the old age law, which was once again postponed. It had been promised to us so many times that, this time, we had the naivety to believe it. We fell from a height when we postponed this provision. We don’t want to look at the problem of the dependency of the elderly and aging in general, because we have to look at how much we are going to put in the pot.
Minister Brigitte Bourguignon spoke of a cure for transparency in nursing homes. Are you expecting more investment and human resources?
We need a cure of investment and human resources, that we put everything flat, and that all the stakeholders around a table say what to do, what to avoid and this is how together we will build. We have been trying to achieve this for years. Each time, we got nowhere. What we fear is that, the bellows of Victor Castanet’s book falling and the electoral campaign passed, we move on again to something else. And that we take advantage of the fact that the media will be less involved to do the minimum.