The government announced on Friday the launch of three administrative missions responsible for developing ways to better identify, quantify and, above all, prevent abuse against the elderly or disabled, children or vulnerable people.
These studies, entrusted to the General Inspection of Social Affairs (Igas), the Superior Council of Public Health and the National Health Conference, should “shed light on a known but insufficiently documented situation,” the Ministry of Health said in a press release. Health. Solidarities.
“Identify effective prevention strategies”
The objective of this work is to optimize the information systems that allow warning signals to be issued and to prepare an inventory of research on these issues.
It is necessary to “identify risk factors and therefore effective prevention strategies”, explains one in the environment of Minister Jean-Christophe Combe.
One of the challenges is to allow public powers and society as a whole to address the phenomenon over time, and not just sporadically, as a reaction to this or that scandal, he added from the same source.
The missions entrusted to the three administrative bodies are part of a broader approach that should lead to a “national strategy” to fight abuses led by Jean-Christophe Combe.
This strategy will try to tackle the phenomenon in all its aspects: in establishments or at home, against the elderly, disabled or minors, or even against people in a situation of social vulnerability, who “deserve equal vigilance”, we underlined in the minister’s entourage.
The number of cases of abuse on the rise in nursing homes
The ‘Federation 3977’, which manages a telephone number dedicated to abuse, sounded the alarm this Thursday about the situation in nursing homes: in the first half of 2022 it opened more than 5,000 files for “possible abuse” to adults, an increase of 24% compared to the 1st semester of 2021. This increase “is exclusively due” to the cases reported in nursing homes, he specified.
Only in the first quarter of 2022, the increase in alerts compared to the same period in 2021 could be explained by the Orpea scandal that drew media attention to nursing homes, but the trend continued in the second quarter, which “surprising,” he writes in a Federation press release.
In the end, the increase in reported cases “is explained by both real situations and alert decisions,” according to those responsible for the hotline.
Source: BFM TV
