The government must clarify, from a legal point of view, who will be empowered to authorize the vaccination against Covid-19 of an elderly person with cognitive disorders, the union representing private retirement homes asked on Tuesday.
Posted 12/8/2020 at 4:00 p.m.
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This issue must be resolved before the launch of the large-scale vaccination campaign in nursing homes – probably from mid-January – pleaded at a press conference the general delegate of Synerpa, Florence Arnaiz-Maumé.
According to the establishments, between 40% and 60% of nursing home residents are unable to make important decisions about them themselves, because of Alzheimer’s disease or other related disorders, underlined Ms. Arnaiz-Maumé.
However, vaccination will not be compulsory, and therefore it will be “Essential to ensure the” free and informed “consent of the elderly who will be vaccinated”, Underlined Tuesday in a press release the Minister for Autonomy, Brigitte Bourguignon.
“We will have to clarify who should give consent, because it is not possible that, if an elderly person has two or five children, we ask everyone’s opinion. We need a single referent ”, underlined the general delegate of Synerpa.
The simplest would in theory be contact the legal guardian or curator of the elderly person, but most seniors suffering from cognitive disorders do not benefit from such a procedure, due to the backlog of justice, she observed.
Collection of consent “Will be difficult given the delay accumulated by our country in terms of access to legal protections which are essential for many elderly people”, also observed in this regard the association AD-PA, which brings together directors of retirement homes and home help structures.
“We want the consent to be recorded, written, integrated into the medical file, so that there is no risk of dispute”, Ms. Arnaiz-Maumé observed again.
Beyond this difficulty, professionals in the sector expect that residents of nursing homes, who have priority for vaccination, are mostly in favor of this gesture, “Because it is rather the younger generations who are anti-vaccines”, according to Ms. Arnaiz-Maumé.
The nursing homes were severely affected by the second wave of the epidemic: since July 20, around half of establishments have declared at least one case of Covid. And on December 1, 1,422 “clusters” were counted in retirement homes, according to Public Health France.
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