A second investigation which confirms the first. The government published an administrative investigation report on the private nursing home group Orpea on Tuesday. 500 pages which show that “doubt has no place in this affair”, observed the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran. The latter had entrusted this investigation last February to the General Inspectorate of Finance (IGF) and that of Social Affairs (Igas) in order to verify the facts of mistreatment of the elderly denounced by the journalist Victor Castanet in his book “Les Gravediggers”.
According to the inspectors of the IGAS and the IGF, the “steering” of the establishments of the Orpea group, which are often overcrowded, “gives priority to financial performance” rather than to quality criteria. In terms of food, the “grammages” of the meals served to seniors are “significantly and systematically insufficient”.
Margin on public grants
From an accounting point of view, “the mandatory financial documents transmitted to the guardianship by the nursing homes are insincere and present practices of non-regulatory charging of charges on the care and dependency packages”. Over the 2017-2020 period, Orpea thus generated a surplus of 20 million euros from the allocations paid by the public authorities to take charge of the care and dependency of its elderly residents.
In addition, over the same period, the company irregularly charged more than 50 million euros in expenses to the “care” package paid for by public money.
Report accessible to all
The government had initially refused to publish this report, although its conclusions had pushed it on March 26 to take legal action and demand from Orpea the reimbursement of public grants allegedly diverted from their purposes. But he took refuge behind “business secrecy” to initially refuse to make the report itself public. For their part, the leaders of Orpea said they were in favor of the publication of the document.
The report is now available “in complete transparency” on the website of the Ministry of Health and Solidarity, where it is “accessible to all”, argued on Twitter the Minister Delegate for the Autonomy of the Elderly, Brigitte Bourguignon. In the end, passages from the version published on Tuesday are redacted with certain financial amounts.