Aged-care crisis: Time to end the secrecy around our national shame

IF ANIMALS were to suffer in the way that some of our vulnerable and voiceless elderly Australians are treated, there’d be a national outcry, writes Natasha Bita.

A FRAIL grandmother is bashed in a nursing home. A weak war veteran starves to death because no one helps him eat.

An elderly woman is left unbathed for so many weeks the stench makes nurses retch. Dementia patients prone to wandering are sedated and tied to chairs, abandoned in their rooms. A bedsore is left untreated so long that it ulcerates right through to the backbone.

State of shame

Royal commission

Much to cover

These are true tales of the type that will shock and disgust Australians as a new royal commission shines a spotlight on the systemic abuse and neglect of our elderly in nursing homes. “Out of sight, out of mind,’’ can no longer be the mantra for Australia’s aged care industry.

If animals were to suffer in the way that some of our vulnerable and voiceless elderly Australians are treated, there’d be a national outcry. But in aged care, behind closed doors, it’s hard to know what’s going on. A Byzantine and under-funded bureaucracy means there are too few inspectors on the ground to check on complaints.

When someone blows the whistle to the Aged Care Complaints Commissioner, standard practice has been for a public servant in Canberra to write a polite letter to the aged care home to ask if the accusations are true. What’s required is an unannounced onsite visit so inspectors can see for themselves, with no time or opportunity for a cover-up. Secrecy is enshrined in legislation; the Aged Care Act provides two years’ jail for disclosing “protected information’’ that is either personal, or “relating to the affairs of an approved provider’’.

Martha Dapontes

Pioneer Lodge and Gardens

Whistleblowers are routinely ignored or bullied into silence. A retired aged care nurse told me yesterday he had been sacked for photographing a malfunctioning fire door. Another whistleblower, angry that his aged care home was fudging the rosters in preparation for an upcoming government audit, cancelled our interview for fear of losing his job. Aged care providers can be highly litigious. One nursing home hired a lawyer to find the source of information it suspected a whistleblower had sent this newspaper.

Abuse, neglect and cost-cutting have been widely exposed by the four federal parliamentary inquiries being held simultaneously into aged care quality, funding and staffing. But the identities of alleged perpetrators and victims are redacted. Correspondence to and from the Aged Care Complaints Commission is confidential. Audit reports from the Aged Care Quality Agency are vague. Its audit of Carinity’s Fairfield Grange nursing home in Townsville last year stated that “medications are not consistently managed safely and correctly’’. It later emerged that police, the Health Ombudsman and the Coroner were investigating the suspicious deaths of five residents, including Charlotte Paluszak. The home has passed a subsequent audit, but police investigations are ongoing.

The luxury John Wesley Gardens nursing home in Geebung passed its first audit in 2016 with flying colours. Barely a year later, the complaints commission investigated claims that a resident was given maggot or grub-infested food, that residents with dementia were malnourished, and that an elderly woman was not showered for three weeks.

St Vincent's Care Services in Mitchelton

The investigation concluded that “improvements have been made to resident care’’, and the home said it had taken “all appropriate steps to investigate’’ the allegations.

The federal government is now merging the complaints commission with the quality agency, so problems don’t continue to fall through the cracks.

The Prime Minister was prompted to call a royal commission after seeing new statistics showing that the quality agency had been forced to close one home every month last financial year. The agency had deemed residents to be at “serious risk’’ of abuse or neglect in 61 nursing homes - a 177 per cent increase in the space of a year. The number of “reportable assaults’’ had soared by one-third to 3773 – equivalent to one in every 55 residents.

Those statistics do not include the assault of Brisbane grandmother Martha Dapontes, who was left with broken bones the morning after she moved in to St Vincent’s Care Services at Mitchelton last year. A fellow resident with dementia had pushed her to the floor for “speaking too loudly’’. Staff found Mrs Dapontes on the floor three more times after more “unwitnessed falls’’ that left her with broken ribs. The 80-year-old died a month later, from a perforated bowel which an autopsy found to be unrelated. The nursing home later installed security cameras. But it was not required to report the assault to police or health authorities, because attacks by co-residents with dementia or mental health issues do not need to be reported to anyone.

The royal commission will be ugly and painful and hard to watch. But as any nurse will tell you, sunlight is the best disinfectant.