Wild nursing homes are life-threatening

At least eleven people died in the fire in a nursing home in Tuzla on Tuesday night, around twenty were injured. That may not be the end of the black balance of victims.

The causes of the fire are under investigation, and the manager nursing home has resigned.

The investigation will show how comparable the situation is to the deadly fire in the "Ivanović" home in the Veliki Borak neighborhood in Barajevo. Eleven residents of the home died there in January.

Control and nothing else

As previously revealed by BIRN, back in 2018, inspectors from the Belgrade Emergency Management Authority found that the home did not meet the fire protection requirements. Even though the management of the home ignored everything, they still got permission to work and even increased the capacity from 16 to 29 beds.

Their license was revoked only two days after the death - when the home burned down anyway, and so did its residents. The three owners of the home are now facing charges.

"Vreme" in its new issue (on newsstands from Thursday, November 6) investigates who in Serbia is opening care homes for the elderly and what they are like. And does anyone control them at all.

Infrequent inspections

Serbia has only twenty social protection inspectors who should monitor 42 state homes and 277 private ones.

Thus, last year only one regular inspection was carried out, and 83 extraordinary inspections and 77 inspections in the process of obtaining a license.

The key disadvantage, according to Nadežda Satarić, a social worker from the Citizens Association "Strength of Friendship - Amity", is that there are no regular unannounced inspections.

"The inspection plan of the institutions is made on an annual basis and is announced at the beginning of the year when the Social Welfare Inspection will come. This is not good because everyone will prepare for the announced inspection," she told "Vreme".

No one knows how many unsanitary nursing homes there are in Serbia. "The alarm is raised only in cases where there is an excess or a fire in such a building, and everything else remains under the radar," says Satarić and adds: "Who is allowed to report when they do not know who is behind the work?"

***Read the entire research in the new issue of "Vremena" from Thursday (November 6) or **subscribe to the affordable digital edition