FRankreich’s private nursing home operators are a major power in Europe. They make billions in sales because they run thousands of homes and specialty clinics. Korian, the number one in Europe, is also the market leader among private nursing homes in Germany. Some of Orpea’s more than 1,000 facilities are even located in China; in Paris, Orpea’s shareholders are currently valued at 6.6 billion euros.
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But the Corona virus crisis has put companies through a difficult test. More than 10,000 people in the French nursing homes have succumbed to the corona virus. There are also those residents who died in the hospital. According to official estimates, around half of the approximately 30,000 French deaths related to retirement homes.
“Because of our homes in China, we were warned very early”
A quarter of France’s nursing homes are privately owned, the rest are non-profit and government-owned. The European market leader Korian in particular has now come under fire. Almost a third of the residents died in one of his nursing homes north of Cannes. Relatives have filed lawsuits, leftist Unions and politicians protested. “The return is simply in the foreground for them. Like the government, they managed the crisis poorly. The material was saved, ”says representative of the CGT union at Korian, Albert Papadacci.
But is it really that simple? On the one hand, it is not known whether more people died in private nursing homes than in public houses, because there are no official statistics yet. The critical union leader Papadacci admits that the state homes are not generally better, “because there are savings everywhere.” The private providers are the only ones who communicate about the death rate. By the end of May, Corian had 716 deaths in 308 French homes because of Corona, while Orpea had 475 deaths, largely in 225 French nursing homes.
Orpea knew how to take himself largely out of the line of communication. “Because of our homes in China, we were warned very early,” says France chief Jean-Christophe Romersi, of the FAZ. “We closed our homes to visitors very early on and carried out extensive tests.” However, this did not prevent Orpea The average death rate per nursing home is similar to that of arch-rival Korian.
No more than one percent of the workforce involved
The statistics are to be handled with pointed fingers. Because the facilities cannot be viewed in isolation from their surroundings. What can a nursing home do if the nearby hospital simply refuses to accept older patients? This has happened again and again due to the shortage of intensive care beds at the height of the Covid crisis in France. All players in the nursing and health care sector suffered from similar grievances: there was a lack of hospital capacities, masks, virus tests and a strategy to isolate those infected.
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