This is the first time that FinnishNews has used an expletive in an article and it is justified given the awful and negligent care meted of by their healthcare company to old and weak patients!
They are meant to be caring for older folk but they failed with a deliberate policy of cheating these people and now their operation of a “care home”, (a better word would be “prison”), has been suspended by the government’s regulator.
The story is the usual one that are being reported all over Europe where populations are ageing. But this case is much worse…
Just a few months ago in May June 2019 several private care companies in Finland were severely reprimanded by the government and they were closed down by the public sector taking over operations.
The reasons were published in this article “Private Healthcare Failure of Aged in Finland” and can be summarised as follows:
- Patients have been left for days in wet and dirty nappies.
- Patients have not been able to have regular showers.
- Patients have not received their prescribed medicines
- Patients have not received professional treatment – untrained taxi drivers and security folk have been caring for patients because trained staff is not present as agreed.
This month the regulator has suspended the operations of a care home owned and operated by a private company called Pihlajalinna. This company has two doctors as big owners, Dr. Mikko Wiren and Dr. Leena Niemistö who have raked in tens of millions of euros together with the recent sale of this company to another big private care company called Mehiläinen, also with doctors as owners. The resulting company will control around 23% of public healthcare services which is a huge limit on competition.
The big scandal of this suspension of operations is that these owners must have been or should have been aware of the operations of this suspended care home, where, according to media reports, patients were suffering from a lack of professional qualified staff, where drugs were not carefully and properly given to patients, and where patients were left in pain for days! Even unqualified security staff were caring for some patients and it was also reported there was not enough cash to buy adequate food for patients!
… and these owners are raking in tens of millions as wealthy shareholders and probably claiming that, “they did not know…” or “now remedial action is being taken”. They cannot pass the blame on to the CEO of this company – he too is a major shareholder!
These owners should be prosecuted for such negligence – their elderly patients have no way of screaming for justice, many have no caring family, and many may be prisoners in their own beds… there can be no excuses for such activities.
