“No one should stay here.” The parent of a patient placed in a boarding school for the mentally ill in Elliniko describes “K” the degraded living conditions prevailing there.

The boarding school, which currently houses eight people, as well as another boarding school in Byron, are owned by the same NGO, which is being investigated for mismanagement while other means of decontamination are being sought to transfer patients.

According to the testimony of the parent, whose information is available to “K”, an adult patient of a young age is temporarily in the family until a decision is made to transfer him to another deassimilation structure.

“I was not allowed to see the child. But what am I supposed to see how they did it? says parent “K”, explaining that his child was found skeleton and in a bad mental state, due to the high doses of medication he was given while he was in a special boarding school. He complains that he was not allowed to see him for about three months under various pretexts, and when – after an accident inside the building – he was taken to the hospital, the family was not informed about the place of hospitalization. “”We are not allowed to tell you what kind of hospital this is.“They told me on the phone,” says the parent. “I took 166, they helped me, and this is how I found it. Seeing me, the doctor said to me: “God sent you. The child wanted his mother.”

Communication, shortage and mismanagement

Parents did not keep themselves waiting long footprints on his child’s feet from being tied up. Although he reported the event to the government agency with oversight powers, they informed him that it was up to the system of each entity and allowed when the patient was in a crisis.

“Protective bed rest is allowed only in cases of arousal of the patient, only in hospitals, in the presence of a doctor and four more employees, provided that the vital organs of the patient are measured every 20 minutes,” he tells K. former staff memberwho also witnessed the case of the binding of the patient with straps, the details of which are at the disposal of “K”.

“The human mind cannot comprehend what is going on,” the same former employee says, corroborating the parent’s description of what happened. lack of food and basic necessities guests that their families covered at their own expense, although they were not obliged to.

“When a new colleague came in, patients would ask him how long he would be staying,” the former employee says, referring to frequent dismissals of employees due to non-payment of accruals. The main reason for the neglect of patients was understaffing: “There was no medical base, the work of nurses was performed by psychologists.”

Transfer of patients after check-ups

Initial reports of the closure of facilities by order of the prosecutor’s office, apparently, were not confirmed. the decision came from the Mental Health Department of the Ministry of Health and focuses on the problem of mismanagement, with the direct beneficiary being unemployed workers, some of whom, according to K, have not been paid for the entire past year.

POEDIN, through your president Michalis Giannakuhe mentioned that there was an intention to transfer the patients of the two structures in question to the two new dormitories of the Dromokaiteo Psychiatric Hospital of Attica, where, however, the transfer of other patients in the context of their de-asylum was already planned.

“We were told: ‘You will not go to the patients you have chosen’, who are ready to leave any day now, have been in Dromokaiteo for many years and are happy to leave. The administration reacted, because after all this preparation it is impossible to tell the patients that they will not go,” Mr. Yannakos tells K, and adds that if there were no domestic problems for the residents of the boarding school, the ministry would not make a decision on the transfer because the system is already overloaded and the existing placement structures are not enough.

Debts 1.5 million euros

“The body can no longer allocate money. Due to administrative problems, the county is not paying him and he currently has 1.5 million in debt,” the reason for the decision to close reads. Menelaos TheodoroulakisPresident of the Argo Federation, representing private law entities that take on part of the deassimilation.

The civil non-profit company that is in charge of two boarding schools appears to have received EUR 1,186,795.65 from the NSFR in 2014-2020 for at least one of them (“Establishment of a boarding school for 15 adults with severe mental retardation”) . and secondary psychiatric disorders).