Coronavirus: Safe visits for elderly would be fine result

Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck. Picture: Getty Images

The Morrison government and senior federal bureaucrats have felt ambushed by the aged-care royal commission over COVID-19.

In August they could barely believe what counsel assisting the commission Peter Rozen was saying.

Rozen accused the government of having no specific COVID-19 plan in place for aged care. He said it was a healthcare plan being passed off as an aged-care plan.

And he said the government had displayed “a degree of self-congratulation and even hubris” in the lead-up to Victoria’s COVID-19 second wave that resulted in the deaths of 630 aged-care residents.

Lessons from the initial outbreak in two NSW homes in March and April were not heeded, Rozen said.

The accusations hurt, leading to the government submitting an 80-page rebuttal in September. It pointed out the commission had originally said the purpose of the COVID-19 hearing “was not to find fault or apportion blame” and that the Victorian outbreak was expressly excluded from the scope of the hearing. Both parameters were ignored, it said.

With that as background, the commission’s special report is more conciliatory in tone.

“Now is not the time for blame,” it says, though it still contains the occasional barb, saying measures implemented by the government, on the advice of the key health committee, the AHPPC, were insufficient to protect aged-care residents.

In coming up with a series of six recommendations, the commission listened to direct evidence of people who had been locked in facilities for months, or their families.

One witness, UY, spoke of her father who had been in residential care with motor neurone disease since June last year. She said her dad couldn’t understand why he couldn’t touch and hug his family, and deteriorated rapidly.

He died in June this year.

“I believe Dad gave up wanting to live because his family support and connection was disconnected. As an Italian man, he had lost what he called his ‘blood support’. Without this, he did not have meaning,” UY said.

With evidence like that, it is little wonder the commission has moved to recommend an immediate funding boost to support more staff to ensure longer visits by families and friends.

Another sensible recommendation is more funding of mental health and allied health services in aged care during the pandemic to ease the physical and mental burden of the pandemic.

The still-contested argument between the commission and the government about whether there has been a specific COVID-19 plan in place for aged care is bewildering and irrelevant to the general public, who just want residents safe and well looked after.

If the aged-care royal commission’s special report on COVID-19 leads to more nursing home residents being safely visited by their loved ones for the remainder of the pandemic and more stringent infection controls that keep this frail community and those who care for them alive and well, then it will have served its purpose.