St Vincent’s Care Werribee resident William Keating fell into ditch after home’s safety failure

A judge has found St Vincent’s aged care in Werribee failed to take basic safety precautions after a missing resident broke his arm and ribs when he fell into a ditch.

A Werribee nursing home had no idea one of its elderly residents had gone missing and fallen into a nearby construction ditch, until his panicking daughter spotted him waving for help.

St Vincent’s Care Services, which operates St Vincent’s Care Werribee, was last week found guilty of failing to ensure its residents were not exposed to risk, more than three years after then-88-year-old resident William Keating was found at the bottom of a construction ditch.

He suffered from a broken arm and six broken ribs, waving his newspaper in desperation.

At a three day hearing in April, the home unsuccessfully argued having residents sign out of the home when they left was impractical, and would only have given them “minimal protection” if they went missing.

William Keating (right) fell into a construction ditch near his aged care home in 2018.

In a damning decision, Judge Michael O’Connell said it would have been reasonably practical for the home to have a simple sign-out book at front reception, so staff could go looking for residents if they did not return when expected to.

“Monitoring when (residents) leave and when they return seems to me to be a simple way of helping to ensure that when they do so, the risks to their health and safety are minimised,” Judge O’Connell said.

Prosecutors did not allege the home was responsible for Mr Keating’s fall, only for not having in place a system to keep tabs on elderly residents who had not returned from their outings.

Mr Keating spent four weeks in hospital after he fell into the unfenced ditch on one of his regular morning walks.

St Vincent's Care Services will be sentenced at a later date after being found guilty of workplace safety offences in the County Court.

Nursing staff did not know Mr Keating was missing until his visiting daughter, Jennifer Luckhurst, raised the alarm after looking around the home for 45 minutes.

Ms Luckhurst told the court of the moment her husband spotted her dad waving a newspaper from the bottom of the 45cm deep hole on the construction site.

Prosecutors argued that, if it were not for Ms Luckhurst and her husband coming to visit that morning, staff would not have known he was missing and he would have been left in the hole until someone stumbled across him.

Judge O’Connell said: “In my view, there needed to be a means of knowing if he was not back within a reasonable time so that the necessary inquiries could be made to ensure Mr Keating was okay.

“As it happened, he was not – he was lying in a ditch in a seriously injured condition with broken ribs, other broken bones, and serious lacerations, for a considerable period.

“That was avoidable …”

Mr Keating, a father of five and grandfather of 11, died in late 2018, nine months after his fall.

The company will be sentenced at a later date.