Nursing Care Laws seen ailing/Tighter Criteria needed to define facilities, weed out dodgy operators.
by Asia News
31 March, 2009
Takashi Koyama, Koichi Uetake and Hisashi Kiyooka / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff
The fatal fire on March 19 at a nursing care, facility in Shibukawa, Gunma Prefecture, shed light on problems associated with unauthorized facilities for elderly people.
According to a Yomiuri Shimbun survey, as of March 23, there were 464 unauthorized facilities across the country.
Gunma Gov. Masaaki Osawa expressed his remorse over the fire, which killed 10 people, and pledged to introduce more measures to deal with unauthorized nursing facilities.
“We should have handled the issue more carefully,” Osawa said.
The Gunma prefectural government first heard about Seiyo Home Tamayura more than two years ago, but hesitated to take steps to learn about conditions there.
“Facilities that haven’t notified the government of their operations are not subject to the Welfare Law for the Elderly and we aren’t authorized to tell them what to do,” a Gunma government official said.
The prefectural government on three occasions asked Tamayura to agree to inspections by the local government and submit reports on its management and operations.
The Gunma prefectural government held a meeting in April 2007 with the aim of urging facilities believed to be fee-charging nursing homes to submit applications for official recognition. The nonprofit organization Saikei-kai that operates Tamayura did not attend the meeting, and the local government section in charge of the meeting did not contact the nursing home to ask why it had not been present.
The Gunma government initially classified Tamayura as “an unauthorized fee-charging nursing home for the elderly.” However, after media organizations pointed out that the local government did not make sufficient efforts to learn how the facility operated, it said it was unable to define the nature of the facility until its current status had been confirmed.
If a facility declares itself to be capable of accommodating elderly people in need of nursing care a proper license is important to ensure it operates in line with the law. Unauthorized facilities, which are not subject to official standards for equipment or information disclosure, often operate out of public view. In the past, there have been cases in which care workers have physically abused residents at such facilities.
Abridged
SOURCE: Siam Daily News
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It is surprising that frail/vulnerable seniors were allowed to be placed in facilities that are not subjected to comply with certain standards. Authorities responsible for overseeing nursing homes and the like, have a duty to 'discover' those dodgy operators of unauthorised facilities.
It is not an excuse for them to cite 'we did not know they existed'.
What occurred in the fatal fire of that nursing home MUST NOT be allowed to happen again.
... AC
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