Empty nursing home costing $56,000 a month

Australian taxpayers have been slugged an average of $56,400 per month to keep open a 40-bed nursing home in Victoria which has had no residents.

Nationals MP Damian Drum. Picture: AAP

Australian taxpayers have been slugged an average of $56,400 per month to keep open a 40-bed nursing home in regional Victoria which has had no residents or staff on-site since the start of the year.

The Australian can reveal that federal Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck’s unprecedented ­intervention to stall the permanent closure of the DP Jones aged-care facility in Murchison was extended throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since November last year, at least $564,000 has been allocated from the Health Department budget to stop the facility’s administrator, SV Partners, selling the nursing home, which was forced shut after racking up debts of between $3m and $4m.

Commonwealth funding for the nursing home, a support never previously provided by the Aged Care department, is now expected to continue for up to six months to facilitate the reopening of the centre under a new operator.

Nationals MP Damian Drum — who lobbied Scott Morrison, Nationals leader Michael McCormack, Health Minister Greg Hunt and Senator Colbeck for emergency financial support after the nursing home went into voluntary administration in October — said regional Australians deserved the same access to care as capital city residents.

“I don’t expect people from Melbourne or Sydney to understand the importance of this — however, people in the regions will,” Mr Drum told The Australian. “The amount of taxpayer funding that finds its way to regional Australia is a pittance of what gets spent in Sydney and Melbourne, even on a pro-rata formula.

“The funding we have put in to this nursing home so far has been necessary because once it went into administration, the federal government no longer had total control of its operation.”

Senator Colbeck would not comment on funding arrangements for the DP Jones nursing home, instead offering a response from a government spokesman confirming they had asked SV Partners not to sell the centre ­during the long-running Victorian COVID-19 crisis.

“The government’s current policy is to consider the viability and future of all aged-care facilities that require financial assistance and provide support where possible — particularly to those in the bush — so senior Australians who need to move into residential care can do so as close as possible to their own homes,” the spokesman said.

“The government asked the administrator not to put the DP Jones facility on the market — which may have seen the asset sold and used for purposes other than aged care — while the COVID-19 outbreak in Victoria was occurring.

“This was in order to explore every opportunity for the facility to reopen in order to deliver aged-care services to the community of Murchison.”

The initial legislative instrument used by the government to provide funding to SV Partners was initially made on the grounds of “human rights”.

“Funding will be provided to support the operation of the service while a sale is being considered, thereby allowing residents in Murchison to continue to be able to access commonwealth-funded aged-care services and to have their needs addressed,” the legislation said.

Shortly after nursing home residents were moved out in January and the facility shut on February 10, The Australian revealed there had been interest from local aged-care providers, including Honeysuckle Regional Health.

Senior government figures on Monday said that negotiations for a new provider to take over the nursing home were well-­advanced.

An SV Partners spokesman would not comment on how much funding they had received from the commonwealth because the “matter is ongoing”.

Sources close to the DP Jones negotiations told The Australian that commonwealth support for the facility could exceed $1m, with funding options being considered inside government, including the use of funds within ­Mr McCormack’s Infrastructure Department.

A Department of Infrastructure spokesman told The Australian they had “not been asked to look for funding arrangements for the DP Jones facility”.