Nargiz Asadova: Good afternoon. I’m pleased to welcome Olga Golodets, Deputy Prime Minister on Social Issues to our studio in St Petersburg. Good afternoon.
Olga Golodets: Good afternoon.
Nargiz Asadova: I’m very glad that you have come. So many questions have piled up. People from all walks of life have gathered at our studio to see you. Let me warn you right away that they have asked me to convey some questions to you. We have chosen a group of questions linked with the decidedly grown-up issues of children in Russia. I’d like to ask you about statistics. What is the child mortality rate in Russia? What figures have been registered?
Olga Golodets: Children’s issues are at the top of the Government’s list of priorities. Nothing is more important. This is a very important reservation. This is the main topic and many of our programmes are linked with childhood. We have launched two major programmes. The first has to do with the construction of 34 perinatal centres in regions that do not have them (32), and the second provides for the building of preschool institutions – we want to tailor our demography to the social infrastructure.
Nargiz Asadova: We interviewed Head of Ingushetia Yunus-Bek Yevkurov in our studio. He asked us to say hello to you and tell you they need kindergartens.
Olga Golodets: Yes, they need both kindergartens and schools in Ingushetia. This is a common problem for the Caucasus and Russia as a whole. Access to school education is nowhere so urgent as in Ingushetia and Dagestan. Many children in these republics go to school in three shifts, so practically they don’t study at all. This is a serious challenge for the entire country.
Speaking about the mortality rate that you asked about, today this is the indicator of the quality of life. We expected that with a switch to new live birth standards…During the past year we did not record a live birth of a baby who was 500 grammes or a bit more. Starting this year we have switched to international standards and such babies have pulled through. We have made some achievements in this respect. Even with the transition to the new live birth standards our indicator remains stable and good – 8.5 per 1,000.
I hope we’ll continue this trend and step up our efforts to improve infant health. We have all the necessary prerequisites for this: qualified doctors, hospital equipment and work organisation. We have learned to deal with complicated cases. If a child needs to be taken to hospital, this is done without any delay. We have a very good indicator that came as a surprise. I’m referring to the maternal mortality rate. Year in and year out, it stands at 16 and 11 per 1,000. This is no worse than in Europe. We don’t have any illusions. We understand that this is the result of many programmes that have been carried out before, for instance those on building perinatal centres and the formation of a three-level care system for mothers. This system provides for revealing complications at early stages of pregnancy and women’s registration with specialised institutions where they receive qualified aid. This is the result this system has produced.
We hope for the continuation of the programme for building perinatal centres in regions that do not have them. We also hope that the regions that are still behind the average national figures will match them. These are the main indicators of the quality of life – the health of mothers and children and the national life expectancy.
Nargiz Asadova: Mr Khloponin said recently that he lost 110,000 children in the Caucasus. I understand this is because of swindling related to maternity capital for the most part. Organised criminal groups register births that didn’t take place in order to get maternity capital and cash it in. Have you resolved this problem?
Olga Golodets: Let me tell you about this. By September 1 we’ll introduce a uniform system for registering children on a waiting list for kindergartens. There will be a uniform queue. This will allow us to compare the number of registered children with those who receive a place in a kindergarten. In other words, this system will become absolutely transparent and such discrepancies will be completely ruled out. Each child will have a birth certificate with one number and all reference information and we’ll see that this is a specific child – Petya, Masha and so on and so forth, and there will be no gaps.
Nargiz Asadova: I understand that one of the problems was that at one time only those children who matriculate in general educational schools are registered. In Ingushetia, for instance, some children do not go to school, but study at madrasahs and are not registered in any way.
Olga Golodets: We believe in lots of cases it is not registered whether children are being educated or not. We found out that some children go abroad with their parents for some time. They discontinue their studies at school. Regrettably, there are cases when compliance with our laws on education, which give every child the right to an education, is not properly monitored. The new electronic system will allow us to compare how many children have been registered at birth, at outpatient clinics or are on the waiting list for kindergartens. It will allow us to be aware of 100% of children, and see whether they have gone to school or receive medical aid. We’ll be able to monitor all this.
Nargiz Asadova: And what’s the problem? Is there some gap in our legislation? Or are some agencies not doing a good job?
Olga Golodets: Today this is a technical problem. In the past control over general education was very simple – municipal inspectors went from one flat to another and registered all children. But now it is common for children not to live where they are registered, and there is nothing wrong with this. Nobody is checking flats, because very often their residents simply won’t open the doors. So old methods are no good and new ones are not yet there. We’ll introduce them by September 1 and the monitoring system will be fully restored.
Nargiz Asadova: And will this be done in practical terms? How will they check whether my children are getting an education or not?
Olga Golodets: As soon as your application arrives at school we understand that you have received a place in it. Children are registered for the first form in the majority of regions. The school registers that your child has come to study. By comparing the database on children and those who came to school, municipal agencies can see who hasn't gone to school. They should look for such “missing” children and find out why they didn’t turn up at school. If they went to school in some other region, this should be registered. We have no right to leave children without an education.
Nargiz Asadova: Irina Vorobyova, Ekho Moskvy host and an activist of Liza Alert, a group that searches for missing people, including children, asks whether it is possible to improve communications between medical institutions and the police. Quite often a missing child or teenager cannot be found after being brought to a hospital because the child doesn't remember his or her home telephone number. At the same time, there is no routine contact between medical institutions and the police. Can this be regulated?
Olga Golodets: Yes it can. But we have a bigger problem on our hands, which hopefully we will soon remove. The police only launch an official search operation one, two or even three days after a child is reported missing. But in these circumstances, each hour can be critical in saving a life. We discussed this issue at the commission for the affairs of minors. This problem will be resolved. Where relations between medical institutions and the police are concerned, I have received no signals in this regard. But I will be pleased to work with…
Nargiz Asadova: Consider this a signal.
Olga Golodets: …with our colleagues concerned. After all, every medical institution has a duty to alert relatives if a child is brought to them – that is, aside from saving the child’s life. The medical service will not relax until relatives are identified. We’ve had no reason to be displeased with these services, but if there are some reasons, we’ll have to investigate each case separately.
Nargiz Asadova: I have a few questions about orphanages. After the President ordered a document to be drawn up that would regulate the activities of orphanages in Russia, people at different levels called for organising public oversight over orphanages. Why is this necessary? While investigating various orphanage-related misdemeanours, we, journalists, come across instances of abuse of office by orphanage employees. For example, children are committed to mental institutions, are given psychotropic injections, and no one knows about these children. If volunteers fail to find this out and sound an alert, strong tranquilisers are administered for weeks on end. What is to be done about this and how far advanced is the drafting of the document?
Olga Golodets: A law is being drafted, which will be tabled in autumn. It provides for the organisation of school boards and public councils, which will oversee all medical institutions for children and orphanages. This rule is mandatory for educational establishments, but the current legislation does not regulate this aspect with regard to social security and medical institutions. The Board of Trustees under the Government of the Russian Federation raised this issue last year. The law is intricate and, as you may understand, it has many opponents, primarily from among the employees of these establishments. But we will submit the law all the same, because this kind of oversight is absolutely necessary. We have been working with institutions that do have school boards and we want to make their track record available to others in Russia. At the same time, it is very important to understand the nature of these public councils and to offer relevant tips. Mental hospitals are a very grave issue. I have ordered an oversight procedure be drawn up to handle the sending of children to these institutions on medical grounds. We must prevent all cases in which children are hospitalised without sufficient grounds and closely oversee the course of treatment if they are. As you may remember, we promised to complete the annual health survey at orphanages by July 1. The survey is drawing to a close. All children who needed hospitalisation or complicated surgery (we discovered 54 very grave cases) are either in hospital or have had surgery or are being prepared for surgery. There are 983 children whose diagnosis has been changed. Actually we are going to revoke their diagnosis of mental retardation. Another important point related to this system of oversight is that we have been engaged in painstaking work drafting medical, rehabilitation and teaching schedules for each child. It is a known fact that children at orphanages, even if they come from psychologically healthy families or were brought up under decent conditions, have suffered serious trauma. You are not sent to an orphanage for nothing in this country. This is why any child at an orphanage needs a special approach and special care and a very sophisticated rehabilitation programme. But we come across situations where a really good programme may be devised but there is no quality oversight of its implementation. There is a programme and a child is sent to an orphanage but employees over there practice their own discretion.
Nargiz Asadova: Far from all orphanages employ highly skilled psychologists…
Olga Golodets: Quite right.
Nargiz Asadova: Where can we find them? I know they are not paid that much.
Olga Golodets: No, they are paid decent salaries today. You couldn't get a job at an orphanage even if you wanted to, because of competition. In fact, this is an obstacle to the development of personnel potential at orphanages. Current employees receive very decent salaries and cling to their jobs. But society must demand that they do their work properly and show high-quality performance implementing the programmes. And, of course, these institutions should first of all work to place children in families. Children should not be stuck there forever.
Nargiz Asadova : We’ll talk about the statistics as well. We have information from Liza Alert that many children who run away from children’s homes outside Moscow have an open form of tuberculosis. It’s a prison disease. It turns out it's a widespread problem in suburban children’s homes.
Olga Golodets: Tuberculosis is a problem for all of Russia. Unfortunately, the incidence of tuberculosis is high. It’s a complicated disease that affects both children and adults. There are cases ...
Nargiz Asadova: Why did this happen? In Soviet times, this disease was kept at bay and it wasn’t so widespread.
Olga Golodets: This problem was largely neglected in the 1990s and many specialised institutions that dealt with tuberculosis were shut down. Today, we have a special TB subprogramme as part of our healthcare programme that includes restoration of TB clinics, prevention, and early diagnosis that runs across Russia, especially where the incidence of TB is high.
Nargiz Asadova: Could you please comment on the figures provided by Children’s Rights Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov? He says that the number of children’s homes in Russia has decreased by 25% over the past five years. Is this true? If so, how could this have happened?
Olga Golodets: First of all, thank God, the number of orphans has been declining recently. The number of orphans listed in the database who are looking for foster families has gone down from 118,000 to 115,000 since January 1, 2013.This is my first point. The second point is the staffing problem faced by institutions that deal with abandoned children. Psychological support and correction specialists or heads of children’s homes are hard to come by. Therefore, many regions run several institutions from a single administrative centre in order to improve the quality of the services provided to children.
Psycho-Neurological Boarding School No. 8 in Moscow, which is headed by a man who is well-known in this sphere named Menshov, is one of the best institutions in terms of competence and level of service. The Moscow Government gave them another institution in order to raise the level of service provided by this institution. They are now working hard to make sure that all children live in a place that resembles a normal home. The size of an orphanage does not preclude making a children's home a family-type institution. The same is true of the SOS villages. Here’s an excellent case in point: there is a rather big institution, a village, in the Pskov Region, which is managed and administered from a single place, although the children live in so-called families. This is a professional family; they live in a separate house. Each house is home to five to seven children. However, statistically, the children’s home still looks fairly large. But that’s okay. Therefore, each case in each region should be dealt with very carefully.
Nargiz Asadova: I have another question for you. In early June, the media reported that a child who was scheduled for adoption by American parents died in Nizhny Novgorod. Following the adoption of the Dima Yakovlev law, this child died. That is, he didn’t make it to a new family, and he had a complex heart disease. Can you confirm or refute this information?
Olga Golodets: We have no such fact. We know all the children who are scheduled for adoption by name and we have records showing how many children have already been adopted. Today, 98 children have their adoption papers in progress. Those children who were to be adopted by American parents, but won't be as a result of the new law, will now go to Russian families, and the adoption papers are being put together. There remain about 100 children, and we hope that they will all find a new family by the end of this year.
Nargiz Asadova: Here's another question that requires your clarification. Recently, the media reported that if a child from a children’s home dies, God forbid, his or her funeral will not be covered from the budget.
Olga Golodets: No, that’s not how things are at all. All issues involved in children’s well-being, such as food and clothing, and the problem that you mentioned – everything is taken care of, and the Government spends a lot of money on children residing at children’s homes. We are going deeper than that today, discussing issues such as comfort, physical and psychological development and socialisation of children. We want these children to be fully integrated into society after they leave their respective children's homes, and to be successful too, so society is doing the best it can to help these children. I would like to say a big thank you to all the volunteers, the trustees, and all the staff members of children's homes, who are very professional. There are outstanding people working at children’s homes who have achieved really good results in promoting socialisation among children. I hope that we will see this work to the end and resolve this problem in Russia.
Nargiz Asadova: I’m with you on this one. I want to thank the volunteers who take care of children at children’s homes. Thank you for coming and telling us about the children.
Olga Golodets: Thank you.
Nargiz Asadova: Take care.
Source: the Ekho Moskvy radio station
