Nursing home ‘left Mum to die alone with no family or friends’

For Susan Willmott, the discovery of her mother’s body was not the final indignity but one of several.

Betty and her husband, Ken Willmott.

When Susan Willmott got the call that her mother, Betty, had died suddenly in aged care, the nursing home operators said her body had been taken to the funeral home and her personal effects were ready for collection.

When Ms Willmott arrived at the nursing home, she went to her mother’s room and opened her door. Her mother was still inside, dead on her bed. “I will never forget it as long as I live,” a sobbing Ms Willmott said on Monday.

“It was just horrible. She was lying there alone with the door shut and the airconditioner turned up high with this horrible infection in her foot. I just sat there for an hour with her and held her and I cried and cried.”

The discovery of her mother’s body was not the final indignity but one of several indignities in her family’s two-year search for justice about the treatment their mother endured at an Adelaide aged-care home, which cannot be named for legal reasons.

Ms Willmott and her brother believe the death of their previously healthy 87-year-old mother was hastened or caused by an infection in her foot that had not been properly dressed or treated.

Beyond that, the circumstances surrounding Betty Willmott’s 2017 death epitomise the issues raised in last month’s interim report of the aged care royal commission: the prescription of sedatives as a form of patient control, the housing of residents of sound mind with dementia patients, neglect of basic ailments because of understaffing, and poor lines of command between carers, nurses and doctors.

On top of that, there’s a stonewalling by bureaucracy when it comes to uncovering the truth.

Ms Willmott has provided The Australian with photographs of the right heel infection she ­believes hastened or caused her mother’s death. She took the ­photos while she was in her ­mother’s room on the day she died, December 23, 2017, suspicious that the infection had played a role.

The four photographs are too graphic for publication and show yellowing and greying flesh on her infected foot; worse, they also show a putrid bandage sodden with bodily fluids.

“After Mum died, I never ­received a courtesy call from her doctor and had to wait four days after her death even to speak to him. We were told she was found cold and unresponsive at 7.55am but were left in the dark as to why. The doctor told me Mum could have had a heart attack or a stroke. I challenged him on this, and he added it could have been sepsis from her foot,” Ms Willmott said.

A subsequent autopsy gave her mother’s cause of death as a general infection contracted at the ­facility.

“It is hard to see how it could have been that infection in ­isolation when Mum had been ­battling the foot infection for two months,” Ms Willmott said.

She has spent the past two years battling bureaucracy through a series of freedom-of-­information requests, with many key details redacted on account of the aged-care centre being privately owned, and has also given evidence to the royal commission.

She remains troubled that her mother was given heavy doses of painkiller Endone, even though she had not been experiencing pain for most of her 7½ months at the centre.

Aged-care whistleblower Stewart Johnston said the most disturbing aspect of Ms Willmott’s campaign was what she had uncovered about inspections at her mother’s centre. Her mother died in December 2017, but it wasn’t until April this year that the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission did an unannounced audit of the centre, where only 21 of 44 ­relevant criteria were met.

“Mum was left to die alone with no family or friends,” Ms Willmott said. “I am still hurting, more so that this could have been avoided had people done the right thing.”