Moroccan Author Slams Elderly Care in French Institutions, Contrasts with Family-Centered Approach

Back in France, Sabrina Bakir-Rio, a novelist and editorial manager of a publishing house, recounts her trip to Morocco, where she was at the bedside of her sick father. "I have just left my father whose health has become very fragile, and yet I leave serene, because I know that he is at home, bedridden, surrounded by my mother and my sister who cover him with all their love 24 hours a day, my brother-in-law, a doctor, who watches over him like his own father, and then there is Houda, the super home helper, who provides him, with kindness and immense respect, with all the care he needs," she writes in Huffingtonpost.

Her 92-year-old father is luckier than the elderly in French nursing homes and hospitals. "As someone living abroad, I am reassured to know our father surrounded by all these attentions and this respect at a time when scandals are multiplying in nursing homes and French hospitals. I tell myself that in France, this country that I love so much, which is one of the greatest world powers, we entrust our elders to establishments and a capitalist system that prioritize economies over the quality of life of our parents," denounces the novelist, without however throwing stones at the nurses or nursing assistants.

Sabrina Bakir-Rio’s father devoted his life to serving France. At the age of 19, he enlisted in the French army and went to fight in Indochina. He worked in the mines in Valenciennes, then at the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt before ending his career within an insurance company.