France Bigorgne
juin 2025
I hesitated a lot before deciding to write this review, but not doing so would make me complicit in both institutional and structural mistreatment. My mother spent a year and a half there between May 2022 and January 2024. She developed behavioral problems resembling dementia following the long period of COVID confinement that the elderly endured (who could psychologically withstand more than a year and a half of isolation in a room without seeing their family and staring at the walls of their room?). What I unfortunately observed in the organization of care, here is a non-exhaustive summary: - lack of hygiene and comfort care (my mother was regularly soaked in her own urine due to a lack of necessary diapers) - restraints placed on her chair to prevent her from falling, without a medical prescription or monitoring of the side effects of this forced immobilization. Furthermore, since my mother was able to move with her feet, the staff placed her in a reclining chair, which I objected to. They found an antique chair high enough so that her feet didn't touch the floor. But when she tried to move around in the single room that served as a relaxation and dining area, they raised the footrests, leaving her legs dangling without any way to relieve the pressure throughout the day. The compression of the popliteal fossa caused circulatory stasis; my mother screamed in pain in her legs, which were hard, swollen, and red. [Reporting] I raised this issue with a nurse (V......E), who replied, "I'm a nurse..." but after my insistence, she finally spoke to the doctor, who ordered a Doppler ultrasound of her lower limbs, which revealed bilateral deep vein thrombosis. Restraint in a chair was standard practice for patients with neurological disorders. While my mother was able to eat almost normally, she was served a "mixture" supposedly containing a blend of vegetables, proteins, and starches, the taste of which was designed to induce fasting. Assistance with meals was limited to less than 10 minutes, making it impossible to eat properly in that short time. She lost over 15 kg in 5 months, going from 65 kg to 47 kg. Again, the nursing staff and the head nurse denied these claims, even though we eventually managed to trace her weight, not without difficulty. Upon arrival at this institution: - An unavailable doctor who told me he had a practice in the village and that it was "very kind of him" to have agreed to do shifts at the nursing home (paid shifts, I should point out). - An administrative director, incapable of finding solutions to this lack of care, who immediately summons complaining families to meetings with union representatives. This is just a small sample of the problems with the care provided to the elderly. If you love your loved ones, I strongly advise you to avoid this facility.
