Coronavirus: Brendan Murphy says aged care commission claims ‘ludicrous’
Brendan Murphy has angrily rejected claims the government wasn’t prepared for outbreaks in nursing homes.
Department of Health Secretary Brendan Murphy has rejected claims the government wasn’t prepared for coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes, accusing evidence given at the aged care royal commission of being “very misleading”.
In a fiery exchange at a Senate inquiry scrutinising the government’s response to COVID-19 on Friday, Professor Murphy hit back at statistics used to criticise Australia’s preparedness for aged care outbreaks.
It comes after counsel assisting the aged care royal commission Peter Rozen QC launched a scathing attack on aged care preparedness earlier this week, telling the inquiry that Australia had one of the highest global rates of deaths among nursing home residents.
But Professor Murphy, who served as Chief Medical Officer until June, lashed the accusations as an extraordinary interpretation of statistics and labelled the conclusion “ludicrous”.
“It’s been an awful situation, but to interpret a percentage of an extremely low death rate as an example of poor aged care management is simply not defensible,” he said. “We find that a very misleading conclusion and we reject that it represents a pejorative assessment of our aged care.
“We’ve had tragic deaths in aged care, but it is only 0.1 per cent of aged care residents, compared to 5 per cent in the UK,” Professor Murphy said, indicating that other countries had suffered close to 20,000 deaths.
Mr Rozen clashed with Professor Murphy at the separate royal commission hearing this week and accused the Morrison government of displaying “a degree of self-congratulation and even hubris” about the aged-care sector in the lead-up to the COVID-19 outbreak in Victoria that has so far left 188 residents dead.
Professor Murphy told the committee he disagreed with Mr Rozen’s assessment.
“Respectfully, I would disagree with counsel assisting,” he said. ”I reject the assumption that we haven’t done a huge amount of work in preparing the sector in a range of areas.”
Asked by Labor senator Kristina Keneally whether he accepted any of the criticisms levelled against the Government in the royal commission, Professor Murphy said the government could have been better prepared when it comes to surge workforces.
“I don’t think anyone expected that several thousand health workers and aged care workforce, that the same workforce would be in quarantine and isolation... and that we would have such a critical issue in (the) health workforce. We’ve never seen that anywhere else in the country.”
He said he would provide a more detailed response at next Friday’s hearing that will specifically focus on aged care.
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