The White House will expand preventive inspections of social facilities

The government proposes to abandon scheduled inspections of state and municipal hospitals, clinics, orphanages, schools and kindergartens in 2024 – inspections will be replaced with preventive visits. Prevention will be mandatory and will help minimize risks at extremely high and high risk facilities. At the same time, instead of fines for violations, inspectors will issue orders to eliminate them – this will help social facilities save funds for development.

The Ministry of Economy has prepared a draft government decree providing for a special regime of control and supervision over social institutions in 2024. Thus, inspectors will not be able to carry out routine inspections of hospitals, clinics, orphanages and shelters, schools and kindergartens, school canteens and other social feeding institutions for children that are classified as extremely high and high risk. Preventive visits will be carried out at such facilities.

In 2022, let us remind you, the White House discovered that due to the moratorium on scheduled business inspections, supervisory authorities concentrated control activities on social institutions, accordingly increasing the volume of fines for violations. The White House was not happy with the situation in which funds allocated from the budget for modernizing education and expanding the availability of social services flow to pay growing fines. Therefore, from 2023, the government has already replaced routine inspections with preventive visits for schools and kindergartens.

According to the Ministry of Economy, over the nine months of 2022, inspectors conducted 50.3 thousand inspections and 58.8 thousand preventive visits to schools. In 2023, the number of inspections decreased to 21.3 thousand, and preventive visits increased to 128.2 thousand. In relation to kindergartens in 2022, there were 19.4 thousand inspections and 26.7 thousand professional visits, in 2023 – 2 ,2 thousand and 57.4 thousand, respectively.

The office of Dmitry Grigorenko, who oversees the reform of control and supervisory activities, reminds that the state has enough tools to monitor compliance with legislation in the education system and in the provision of social services to the population.

“Since the beginning of the year, preventive measures have been carried out in schools and kindergartens, which allows us to shift the focus from detecting violations to preventing them. In the same logic, a draft resolution has been prepared expanding the number of social facilities for carrying out preventive measures,” they explain.

According to the bill, the preventive visit will be mandatory; institutions will not be able to refuse it, which should ensure safety at the facilities. During the visit, inspectors can conduct inspections, sampling, examinations and other control actions. If violations are detected, the supervisory authority issues an order to eliminate them, but does not impose a fine.

If violations are properly eliminated, the institution ultimately will not be held administratively liable. It is expected that this approach will minimize the practice of ineffective shifting of budget funds from one budget item to another and direct them to solving the problems of modernizing social infrastructure and improving the quality of services.

The proposed regulation should extend to all types of control in accordance with the Law “On State Control” (248-FZ), including sanitary and epidemiological control, fire supervision, control in the field of medical activities.

Diana Galieva