Aged care shame: Elderly left on toilets for hours as nurses reveal lack-of-staff horror stories
EXCLUSIVE: Nurses have blown the whistle on neglect in aged care facilities with accounts of frail grannies and Diggers suffering various humiliations as costs are cut.
NSW
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FRAIL grannies and old Diggers are being left to sit on toilets for hours and fed pureed party pies as penny-pinching aged care homes cut costs.
Nurses have blown the whistle on neglect in aged care homes that are facing $1.2 billion in federal funding cuts over the next four years.
One nurse quit after being left in charge of 120 residents, saying that there were “dangerous staffing levels shift after shift’’.
“It was downright reckless and shameful as I knew residents were at risk,’’ she told a Senate inquiry into the aged care workforce.
“The residents stay in faeces longer than is acceptable ... and sat on toilets waiting for help for inhumane lengths night after night.’’
Another nurse who was instructed at the start of her shift to give Panadol to an elderly man to help him sleep discovered that a misplaced catheter had split his penis yet no one had called a doctor.
Carers at another home woke residents at dawn to wash them, “with some still sleeping on a shower chair’’.
The Senate inquiry has heard evidence of retirement homes rationing incontinence aids and feeding residents poor-quality junk food, including pureed party pies and frankfurt sausages.
Nurse “Carmel” quit when she discovered she had to care for 94 residents as well as be the “on call’’ nurse for an entire retirement village of 151 units. “I had to leave for my own sanity, and for professional protection,’’ she told the inquiry.
The state and federal governments refuse to set staffing ratios for aged care homes in the same way as hospitals or childcare centres.
Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation assistant federal secretary Annie Butler said some homes rostered just one nurse to 300 residents. “There aren’t enough carers with knowledge to alert the registered nurses when there is a problem, so people are ending up in hospital getting much sicker or dying,’’ she said.
Jocelyn Hofman, who started nursing 29 years ago, said “it just breaks my heart’’ to think of elderly Australians without proper nursing.
“What kind of society allows the elderly to be dumped in homes without quality care?’’ the Blue Mountains nurse said yesterday.
“It will be our mothers and fathers one day, or it will be us, and we have to give them the dignity they deserve.’’
Health Minister Jillian Skinner would not say whether NSW would scrap its rule that nursing homes have a registered nurse on duty at all times. “The Commonwealth is responsible for regulating aged care facilities and the quality of care provided to their residents, and those regulations apply to aged care providers in NSW,’’ her spokeswoman said.
A federal health department spokeswoman said aged care homes did not have nursing quotas but were required by law to “maintain an adequate number of appropriately skilled staff”.
Catholic Health Australia has told the Senate inquiry that 24/7 nursing is not warranted on “care quality or affordability grounds.
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