Aged Care Royal Commission report is enough to make reader weep

The interim Aged Care Royal Commission makes for shocking reading.

It is difficult to imagine a worse indictment of Australia’s aged care system than the one handed down by the Aged Care Royal Commission.

Consider the descriptors: “cruel and harmful”; “unkind and uncaring”; “a sad and shocking system that diminishes Australia as a nation”.

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The diminishment of older people as “just another body to be washed, fed and mobilised”, the infantilisation, the drugging and strapping, the maggots that feed in open sores, the sometimes belligerent responses of some aged care providers when held to account – it is truly enough to make you weep.

If tragedy can be itemised, the Royal Commission has made an attempt, and in its own words, it is a list that shames 21st-century Australia.

The list is topped by the widespread inadequate management of wounds, sometimes leading to septicemia and death.

There’s poor continence management, with residents often left “sitting or lying in urine and faeces”.

The food in aged care homes is “dreadful”; malnutrition is widespread.

Assaults are commonplace, on both residents and staff.

Minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians Senator Richard Colbeck. Picture: Kym Smith

The use of physical restraint is also, shockingly, common, and worse, it’s often not for their own safety.

Old people are sedated en masse, left sleepwalking through life drowsy and unresponsive to visiting family.

Even the dying are showed little mercy, with “patchy and fragmented” palliative care creating distress for old people in their final moments, and their families.

“It is shameful that such a list can be produced in 21st century Australia,” the interim report says. “At the heart of these problems lies the fundamental fact that our aged care system essentially depersonalises older people.

“A routine thoughtless act — the cup of coffee placed too far from the hand of a person with limited movement so that they cannot drink it, the call buzzer from someone left unanswered, the meal left uneaten with no effort to help — when repeated day after day, becomes unkindness and often cruelty. This is how ‘care’ becomes ‘neglect’.”

Now the task of reforming this broken system lies ahead. The full royal commission report that will map out the enormous task to be undertaken is still a year away.

But there are some reforms the commission says must be undertaken without delay.

Firstly, it says there must be an urgent increase in the number of home care packages so that older people can be supported to stay in their own homes. Currently, people are dying on the waiting list, and families are left with little idea when the support will be forthcoming.

Secondly, the over-reliance on chemical restraint, mostly with psychosis medications and sedatives, must be addressed. The commission is looking to reforms to the role of pharmacists as a possible way of better regulating who is prescribed these medications and for what purpose.

Finally, the commission wants the flow of younger people with disability into aged care to be halted, and to get those suffering through blank lives in aged care homes out.

These things must happen, and it’s only a start. The road to restoring dignity to some of most vulnerable, and giving them the tender care they so deserve, will be a long one.