Health secretary Brendan Murphy says government could have eased nursing home issues

The government could have acted earlier to reduce the impact of Victoria’s COVID-19 second wave on nursing homes, health secretary Brendan Murphy says.

Brendan Murphy at Parliament House in Canberra on Tuesday. Picture: Gary Ramage

The government could have acted earlier to reduce the impact of Victoria’s COVID-19 second wave on nursing homes, health secretary Brendan Murphy says.

If the Victorian Aged Care Response Centre had been swung into action before July 25, the spread of coronavirus could have been reduced in nursing homes, where more than 620 lives have been lost, Professor Murphy told a Senate inquiry on Tuesday.

“If the public health response had been more prompt we might have avoided some of the scale of the outbreaks in Victoria,” he said.

“It’s not possible to say what proportion could have been prevented. Quite likely, with the benefit of hindsight, responding with (the VACRC) a little bit earlier we may well have been able to prevent some of the spread.”

At the peak of the second wave in Victoria, the system was overwhelmed because so many care workers were in quarantine, leaving residential aged-care facilities struggling to staff nursing homes, Professor Murphy told the Senate committee.

“With the benefit of hindsight, particularly in that devastating week where we had two major facilities that lost their entire workforce and we had serious care compromises, if we had stood up the response centre a week earlier we may have been able to respond better.”

Across Australia, 670 people have died in aged-care settings — 633 of them in Victoria.

COVID-19 is much reduced, with 83 nursing home residents currently infected.

Aged Care Quality and Safety Commissioner Janet Anderson also appeared before the inquiry, defending the fact that the commission had not issued any sanctions on aged-care providers between April and June despite receiving more than 2000 complaints about issues such as infection control.

“Our intention in dealing with the complaint is to resolve the issue,” Ms Anderson said.

“It’s not a punitive approach we take and in most cases we satisfactorily resolve the issue that’s been raised with us about a provider.”

“I think it’s a mistake to assume that … where a complaint is received about a provider, that the only tool we have in our toolkit is to issue some regulatory response,” Ms Anderson said.