Jeta Gardens: Shocking pandemic staff levels at crisis-hit aged care facility revealed

A lack of safe staffing laws left the Jeta Gardens aged care facility - where a Covid-19 outbreak has claimed 15 lives - with only one registered nurse for 170 residents during the Omicron wave, a union has revealed.

The beleaguered Jeta Gardens private age care facility has had only one registered nurse for 170 residents during the Omicron wave, highlighting the desperate need for mandated staffing ratios, the Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union has revealed.

QNMU secretary Beth Mohle said the state’s nurses and midwives know catastrophic outcomes, including deaths in private aged care facilities are a direct result of the federal government’s failure to introduce safe staffing laws and effective regulation of aged care providers.

The union has predicted a disaster for years pre-Covid and has made more than 70 submissions in the past nine years to federal, state and other agency aged care inquiries calling for federally mandated nurse-to-resident ratios in private aged care.

The Covid outbreak at Jeta Gardens in Logan has taken 15 lives.

Ms Mohle said the Federal Government’s repeated refusal to mandate safe staffing laws in private aged care, like those in Australian hospitals, was a denial of this basic human right and was at its core a moral failure.

A Carepact team arrives at Jeta Gardens Aged Care, Bethania. Picture: Liam Kidston

“When COVID-19 fatalities are reported, there appears to be a trend of almost dismissing the deaths of elderly. Appallingly, the unsaid ageist point being made by too many people with the power to make change is that they were going to die soon anyway,” Ms Mohle said.

Despite the Royal Commission recommending at least one registered nurse be rostered 24/7 in every aged care nursing home, the Federal Government has only committed to requiring a RN 16 hrs per day from July this year.

If the private sector introduced mandated safe staffing laws, like those in Queensland’s 16 state-run facilities, these numbers would be on average 11 RNs in the morning, 7 RNs in the afternoon and 6 RNs overnight. That’s a total of 24 RNs, 16 ENs and 40 AINs over a 24-hour period – better ensuring safe provision of care and vastly improving patient outcomes and morbidity rates.

A member of the QNMU who works in aged care in Caboolture said that “staff shortages and number of those leaving aged care have been highest I have seen in my nine years. We are being asked to work double shifts, work on days off come in while on annual leave”.

And another from Biloela reports that “in the last 12 months 15 aged care staff have left my facility and only four have been replaced”.