Sneaky boarding school: how to deal with illegal nursing homes
In the Sverdlovsk region, a local resident obtained compensation through the court from a private nursing home, where she placed her mother for two weeks at the time of departure: an elderly woman returned from there with bedsores, bruises on her face and bruised knees. This is just one of the cases of poor-quality services provided in boarding houses for the elderly. Meanwhile, the demand for these institutions is growing, and it is largely possible to satisfy it due to the gray segment of the market. The Ministry of Labor has already finalized and is again going to send for approval a bill on licensing nursing homes, which was developed back in 2023. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
What led to the appeal to a private boarding house
The Verkhnesaldinsky district court recovered material damage and compensation for moral damage from a private boarding house for the provision of services of inadequate quality. The conflict occurred back in 2024, when a local resident, Elena, placed her mother in one of the private institutions for two weeks while she was away from the city. The temporary measure resulted in a deterioration in the elderly woman's health. When her daughter came to pick her up from the boarding house, she found bruises on her face, and upon arrival home, she also had bedsores, purulent formations and bruised knees. Elena went to the hospital and recorded the injuries. Her mother was prescribed treatment, for which the woman spent 28 thousand rubles.
Only later did she find out that, contrary to her instructions, the elderly mother was transferred to an anti-bedsore bed only in the last five days of her stay at the boarding house. At the same time, the staff did not use up all the medicines and hygiene supplies that should have been gone in two weeks of proper care.
The appeal to the Investigative Committee did not lead to anything: the initiation of a criminal case was refused. However, the prosecutor's office, in the interests of the woman and her mother, filed a lawsuit against the individual entrepreneur.
As a result, the court partially satisfied the claims: it collected compensation for moral damage in the amount of 50 thousand rubles and a fine of 25 thousand rubles from the sole proprietor in favor of the victim. In favor of Elena herself, they collected 7,439 rubles in compensation for material damage, as well as compensation for moral damage in 30 thousand rubles and a fine of 18,719 rubles.
Note that there are no officially registered boarding houses in Verkhnyaya Salda. Izvestia managed to find one private organization of this profile with an open address in this city, located in an ordinary five-story brick apartment building. According to the website, this nursing home provides a wide range of services. Prices per day are not biting at all: only from 1 thousand to 1.7 thousand rubles. This amount includes five meals a day, the services of a nurse, daily help with hygiene procedures, psychological support from a specialist, and more.
How is the demand for boarding houses growing
The Ministry of Labor of the Russian Federation informed Izvestia that more than 3,000 organizations providing inpatient social services, including 372 non—governmental ones, are now included in regional registers. About 300,000 elderly people and citizens with disabilities receive assistance in them.
However, according to experts, most of these boarding houses continue to operate in the shadows. And tragedies regularly occur there. For example, in February 2026, three guests of a private boarding house died in New Moscow — there was a massive case of pneumonia. The activities of this nursing home were conducted without notifying Rospotrebnadzor, with gross violations of sanitary and epidemiological standards, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation reported at the time.
At the same time, the demand for elderly care services in Russia is only growing, Evgenia Parmukhina, a leading analyst at the marketing analysis department of the Tekart marketing group, told Izvestia. First of all, due to the aging of the population and the increase in life expectancy.
— According to official government data at the beginning of 2025, the share of citizens over the working age in the Russian Federation reached 24% of the total population of the country, the share of the 65+ population is almost 18%. According to the forecast of the Ministry of Health, by 2030 the share of citizens aged 60+ years will reach 25.4%, and by 2046 the figure will grow to 30.4%, the expert noted.
According to the calculations of the company "Techart", about 450 thousand people potentially need the services of nursing homes. Meanwhile, there are about 258,000 places in public institutions for the care of the elderly, and about 60,000 in private nursing homes, of which 80% are in the gray segment. The private sector is developing against the background of this unmet demand and insufficient number of places in public institutions, as well as often quite low quality of service, Evgenia Parmukhina added.
"It should be noted that a significant part of the potential demand is for people with low incomes who cannot afford the services of legal nursing homes, but also cannot get into government institutions," she said.
The fact is that single citizens, disabled people of groups I and II, left without the care of relatives, the poor, etc., primarily get into government institutions, while legal commercial nursing homes cannot work in the economy segment due to high costs. And this leads to an accelerated growth of illegal or semi-legal institutions.
— Currently, the government has strengthened control over the industry, but, according to rough estimates, the gray segment still continues to provide 7-10% growth in the fund per year, while new legal projects are usually targeted, — said the interlocutor of the editorial board. — According to our forecasts, the commercial sector of the market will exceed 80,000 jobs by 2030.
Studies by other companies confirm these conclusions. In June, Sostav experts analyzed the market of boarding houses for the elderly, having studied more than 300 of them. The study also indicates that large private networks occupy a small market share, and the vast majority of demand is met by facilities without network standards, quality control systems, and unified reporting to patients' relatives. The price range per month is from 20,000 to 250,000 rubles, but the second figure is very rare. Even in Moscow, many private boarding houses offer care for bedridden patients for an amount starting from 1950 rubles, while the real cost of high-quality care, as indicated in the material with links to market participants, starts from 5-7 thousand rubles per day.
The increase in the gray area is taking place against the background of increased demand, which is typical for many countries due to the aging of the population, Elizaveta Oleskina, director of the charity foundation "Old Age for Joy", agreed in a conversation with Izvestia.
— It is clear that there is a queue in public boarding houses in many regions, and even a long—term one, - she drew attention.
The foundation, according to the editorial interlocutor, also sees a clear increase in the demand for home services: it is huge, although the long-term care system, that is, home services for up to 28 hours a week, is still available only to a small percentage of those in need.
In turn, Ramaz Akhmeteli, Chairman of the Council of the National Association of Social Service Participants, added that the growth in demand for elderly care services in recent years has been avalanche-like, so the market reacted to it with chaotic formation, without proper government administration, filters and barriers.
— About 60 thousand elderly people currently receive services in private boarding houses. According to WHO research, 4 to 6% of older people worldwide are subjected to abuse. Based on these data, it turns out that about 3,000 people become victims of abuse in the non—governmental care sector," the expert said.
How will the sphere be regulated
The Ministry of Labor developed a draft law providing for mandatory licensing of elderly care activities back in 2023, but the document has not been adopted. The ministry told Izvestia that in mid-August 2026, the agency resubmitted the draft federal law to assess the regulatory impact.
— The bill has already been posted earlier and has been somewhat finalized based on the results of the received proposals. After the completion of the repeated procedure, the bill will be submitted to the government in due course," the press service of the Ministry of Labor noted. — It is planned that the law will come into force on March 1, 2028.
If it is adopted, a transition period will come for all market participants, during which organizations that are currently operating in the legal field and are included in the registers of social service providers will be able to continue to function, while preparing for the licensing procedure. For other institutions, a license will become mandatory from March 1, 2029.
By now, the bill has been modified relative to the original version, Ramaz Akhmeteli confirmed to Izvestia.
— He criminalizes the activities of at least 85% of the actually existing facilities, as he means an unconditional ban on the implementation of residential care activities, even in detached buildings intended for residential housing, with the simultaneous introduction of licensing, — he said.
The current version of the document does not even have the prospect of adapting mandatory requirements to the working conditions of small organizations, the source added. In this form, licensing will only have a negative impact on the market, pushing some entrepreneurs to operate in an even deeper shadow, the expert warned. Instead of criminalization, in his opinion, it is necessary to deal with "the maximum adaptation of existing facilities to work in new conditions."
Argam Verdiyan, director of the Help for the Elderly Foundation, also said that the law, if adopted, would not resolve the situation in the market, because there would be many problems, including with the qualifications of employees in government institutions. He referred to a study by the foundation that was conducted back in 2021: then it turned out that more than 33% of nursing home specialists work not because of their vocation, but because they could not find another job, and 71.3% of heads of government agencies said that public procurement does not meet the real needs of the elderly.
In turn, Elizaveta Oleskina noted that she could not predict the impact of licensing on the market as a whole. However, according to her, thanks to this, a person who is looking for round—the-clock care for his elderly loved one will have at least a criterion for evaluating institutions: one boarding house has passed a number of inspections, while the other has not.
— The same applies to a person who goes to work in a boarding house: it will be clear that in a licensed one there will be a certain number of employees per shift, and in an "illegal" one there will be a high risk of being alone with 30 or 50 people with limited mobility — and with all the desire it will be impossible to feed everyone, change everyone's underwear and also say a kind word," she clarified.
Licensing does not guarantee 100% that no one will have bedsores and bruises, but it will still reduce the risks of abuse, the editorial interlocutor expressed her conviction, adding that the black market will remain at the same time, since the demand for affordable care is very high, and high-quality services cannot be too cheap.
At the same time, Evgenia Parmukhina did not rule out that if licensing is introduced and business is simultaneously subsidized and whitewashed through compensation for long-term care programs, the legal market will grow quantitatively and qualitatively, and some of the gray players will leave the market.
How not to run into a dangerous boarding house
Elizaveta Oleskina pointed out an alarm bell that is worth paying attention to when choosing a boarding house, if the organization immediately agrees to accept a guest and does not ask about anything. Even in a private boarding house, they must request a certain set of tests, fluorography, etc. This is a matter of the safety of all the guests of the institution.
It is important to visit a loved one often in such boarding houses: This will provide an opportunity to see if there are really as many staff in the shift as promised when the person was placed, how the other residents feel, what the boarding house smells like and how they cook there.
— After all, even if an elderly person does not have cognitive impairments and you expect him to tell everything on the phone, in some cases he may be intimidated or begged to "do not complain, otherwise I will be fired, and I will have nothing to feed the children" and so on. And if a person who can use a phone disappears, the phone does not charge, and visits need to be coordinated in advance, this is not just an alarm bell, it's a wake—up call," concluded the Izvestia interlocutor.
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