Laurent Frémont, head of the Tenir ta main association, denounces in a report submitted Tuesday to the government the measures which during the Covid-19 pandemic consisted of isolating nursing home residents from their families.
The right to visit families in accommodation establishments for dependent elderly people (Ehpad) must be enshrined in law, and “ensure openness in principle, whatever the time”. A recommendation from Laurent Frémont, head of the Tenir ta main association, in a report of which franceinfo reveals the main conclusions on Tuesday November 14. This report will be submitted to the government today after being commissioned by the Ministry of Health and Solidarity, as part of the Aging Well bill.
Laurent Frémont, professor of constitutional law at Sciences Po, denounces the measures which during the Covid-19 pandemic consisted of isolating nursing home residents from their families to avoid the spread of the virus. According to his analysis, “residents were discriminated against”because if “the general population could benefit from release hours for various reasons”residents of nursing homes “were subject to absolute confinement”.
We must look at what he describes as “anthropological injuries”, since some elderly people were able to be isolated even after the lifting of confinements. According to the report, the consequence for residents was a feeling of abandonment for those who died alone and for families, helplessness and anger at the impossibility of saying goodbye to their loved ones.
“Even today, people suffer from this hidden mourning, because they were not able to say their last goodbyes.”
Laurent Frémont, constitutionalist, at the head of the Tenir ta main associationat franceinfo
“They still have a strong feeling of guilt unfortunately and sometimes even they still have difficulty realizing the disappearance of their loved ones whom they unfortunately had to let go behind walls and closed doors”explains Laurent Frémont on fanceinfo.
🔴 “We received more than 10,000 testimonies from people who were still suffering,” says Laurent Frémont, founder of the “Tenir ta main” collective. “Even today, people suffer from this hidden mourning.” pic.twitter.com/2H7yBNdlNP
— franceinfo (@franceinfo) November 14, 2023
The constitutional expert says that the report is based on six months of work and a significant number of testimonies collected in three years by the association: more than 10,000. With this report, “we are trying to show that all this is only the outcome of a deeper conception of care, quite technical, and which favors everything sanitary, everything safe, to the detriment of the link which is the essence of life, of the human relationship, which is essential in the care process”.
Make the right to visit nursing homes “an absolute and fundamental right”
For Laurent Frémont, who himself was not able to say goodbye to his father at the time of the Covid-19 epidemic, the application in nursing homes of “infantilizing and misinterpreted protocols” which constantly followed other protocols have endangered democracy. Closing nursing homes was certainly a lesser evil, but an evil nonetheless, he believes. However, he recognizes that there may be “adaptations in times of crisis”who must “be strictly supervised, proportionate and limited in time”.
“We have fortunately emerged from the worst of the health crisis, but there are certain behaviors that may have taken holdbelieves Laurent Frémont, particularly from EHPAD directors who can restrict visits in an abusive manner. This is the whole purpose of this report: to see what went well and what went less well, to analyze all the causes and consequences of these visit restrictions, and also to propose solutions. measures to ensure that this does not happen again.”declares Laurent Frémont.
The report calls for better training of staff and the implementation “an intermediary structure which would involve users”. In this perspective, the text recommends the transposition of the users’ commission (CDU), which exists in hospitals, to the medico-social sector. This CDU “could thus be a remedy for loved ones and families, particularly on the subject of visiting rights”. He also calls for the creation of “a general controller of places of great vulnerability”. It would be “an independent administrative authority which could investigate and receive complaints from relatives when there are unfortunately situations of abuse“, specifies Laurent Frémont.
Finally, the teacher at Sciences-Po calls on the authorities to “recognize that the management of the crisis was not perfect: our country would be honored to look back on this period, to look in the face at what happened, particularly around the ban on funeral rites, which is an anthropological rupture unprecedented in recent history”. For Laurent Frémont, this would be “essential to have a form of official recognition of people’s suffering, it would be an essential first step to help heal this trauma”. Laurent Frémont therefore asks for visiting rights in nursing homes, “an absolute and fundamental right”. The government intends to enshrine visiting rights in the Aging Well bill which will be discussed in the National Assembly starting next Monday.