“Every 40 minutes, an elderly person dies in the emergency room (ie 13,000 deaths each year)” and “one in three suicides involves an elderly person” (3,000 / year). The figures given by Professor Régis Aubry, president of the National Observatory on the end of life (ONFV), suggest a reality that is unknown to the general public but no less alarming about the situation of elderly people at the end of life.
The shortage of night nurses in EHPADs (accommodation establishments for dependent elderly people) illustrates the problem: less than 15% “of retirement homes have a nurse at night.” If this was the case for all of them. nursing homes, this would however prevent 18,000 end-of-life hospitalizations per year, “notes the ONFV report delivered Tuesday, January 21 to the Minister of Health Marisol Touraine.
Concrete proposals
Respect for the rights of the elderly must become a priority, insists the ONFV, which involves the choice for the elderly to choose their place of life, to stop treatment, to stay at home, or even the right to ” express their wishes in advance (especially for people with Alzheimer’s disease).
The document points to the “large margins of improvement” possible and “inexpensive” to improve the daily life of the elderly.
Among the ten proposals put forward, we will retain the establishment of a night nurse for 250 to 300 places in EHPAD; increasing the resources of mobile palliative care teams to intervene in nursing homes; strengthening the training of home help professionals.
Emphasis is also placed on the need to develop “best practice recommendations to improve the identification of end-of-life situations at home, and thus avoid hospitalizations in the last days of life”.
