Gold Coast dietitian shares heartbreaking story that sparked Royal Commission into aged care

A Gold Coast doctor – and winner of our Wellness Warriors award – has revealed the heartbreaking story the led her to dedicating her life to an important cause.

Wellness warriors winner Dr Cherie Hugo. Photo: Kit Wise.

Dr Cherie Hugo’s fight to improve the quality of life of elderly Australians has seen her claim victory in the Harvey Norman Gold Coast Women of the Year Wellness Warriors category.

Consulting to aged care, it was stories like Charlie’s that got the My Nutrition Clinic director and founder of The Lantern Project “fired up” enough to undertake a PhD in aged-care nutrition, her research ultimately leading to the establishment of a Royal Commission into aged care.

“Charlie was referred to me when he was 93 and at something like 35kg with significant wounds, all the things that relate to someone being malnourished,” she recalls.

Dr Cherie Hugo’s research ultimately led to the establishment of a Royal Commission into aged care. Photo: Kit Wise.

“On his 90th birthday he’d done his first skydive, he’s lived his entire life and now suddenly I’m seeing him in a frail state.

“I remember walking into his room one day and he looked a bit sheepish. I looked in his little fridge and there’s a carton of eggs – there’s no kitchen, what is Charlie doing with eggs?

“Then he closed the door of his room and pulled out his drawer and a little gauze with strings in the corners, and admitted, ‘Actually I lower the egg into my kettle and cook it because they won’t cook soft-boiled eggs for us here’.

“Here’s a resident that still wants choice in what he eats and decides I’m going to take a risk to have something I like. That’s some craziness and Lantern’s goal is to unpack that craziness.”

The Lantern Project is a national collaboration of individuals, industry and government agencies working together to seek solutions to the aged-care crisis.

Cherie says they’re now providing everything they’ve learnt over the past eight years to industry.

“We’ve just launched a tool called EpiCURE which is the outcome of my PhD work and it’s a rating tool for aged care homes around food and nutrition,” she says.

“It allows us to give residents a voice.

“We have 50 per cent of residents who are malnourished at the moment, and that’s been like that for a while in aged care, but we can prevent a lot of that.

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“It’s not a done deal that when someone gets old they lose weight.

“By the time the Royal Commission has finished and outcomes are laid most of these residents will have passed, but here is a solution here and now.

“It’s something backed by research. We’ve got 1200 aged care industry stakeholders that are part of the co-design of what we’ve created.

“We’re all going to get old and food is a fundamental need – we need to get it right.”