Aged Care Royal Commission: ‘Cruel and harmful’ system must change

In a report that has shocked government ministers, the Royal Commission into aged care reveals horrifying assaults, dreadful food, maggots in wounds, and residents doped or left in their own faeces.

A “CRUEL and shameful’’ aged care system is abusing elderly Australians in a “shocking tale of neglect’’, a heartbreaking Royal Commission report revealed yesterday.

The year-long inquiry – which exposed “horrifying assaults”, “dreadful food’’, residents left in their own faeces and the case of a Queensland woman left crying in bed with a broken back – has concluded that a neglectful aged care sector “diminishes Australia as a nation’’.

“This cruel and harmful system must be changed,’’ the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety concludes in a 792-page interim report tabled in federal parliament yesterday.

“It is unkind and uncaring towards (older people and) in too many instances, it simply neglects them.’’

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The report reveals that nursing homes notified the federal Health Department of 4013 cases of alleged physical or sexual assault against residents last financial year, and that a quarter to half of residents are malnourished.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt and Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck yesterday said the Government would spend $21.7 billion on aged care this financial year but had “work to do’’ to fix the system.

“We are shocked by the stories that have arisen but we must and we will learn from them,’’ they said.

Royal Commissioners Richard Tracey and Lynelle Briggs. Picture: AAP/Kelly Barnes

Royal Commissioners Richard Tracey and Lynelle Briggs concluded that “substandard care is much more widespread and more serious than we had anticipated’’.

“We have seen images of people with maggots feeding in open sores and we have seeing video and photographic evidence of outright abuse,’’ they say in their report, titled Neglect.

The Royal Commission heard from a Townsville woman who called an ambulance after finding her mother crying in pain at a nursing home with a broken back.

Brisbane woman Alexandra Dapontes, whose mother Martha Dapontes was left with broken bones after an attack by a fellow resident in an up-market nursing home, yesterday said it was “about time people woke up to the aged care industry’’.

“We’re all going to be old one day and it will happen to us,’’ she said.

The Royal Commission report exposes the “inhumane, abusive and unjustified’’ restraint and doping of the elderly to make them easier to manage by a “poorly skilled, underpaid workforce under pressure’’.

It warns that “people are dying on the waiting list’’ for aged care, and demands more taxpayer funding for in-home care, which has a queue of 120,000 people waiting for assistance.

A failure to help the elderly stay living in their own homes is a “cruel and discriminatory system, which places great strain on older Australians and their relatives’’, the report says.

“It is unfair. Older people should receive the home care services they need to live safely at home,’’ it says.

“It is shocking that the express wishes of older people to remain in their own homes for as long as possible, with the supports they need, is downplayed with an expectation that they will manage. It is unsafe practice. It is neglect.’’

The Royal Commission also demanded “swift action’’ to relocate 6000 young people with disabilities who have been left to live in homes for the aged, blaming to a “lack of will and effort’’ to find alternatives.

“For younger people with disability, their friends stop dropping by and rarely visit over time,’’ the report says.

“It is an isolating and daunting experience. It is not a life.’’

Royal Commissioner Richard Tracey. Picture: AAP/Kelly Barnes

The Royal Commission has called on aged care homes to stop tying down residents or doping them with unnecessary medications to make them “easier to manage’’.

It found that 61 per cent of residents are doped with antidepressant or antipsychotic drugs, despite only 10 per cent requiring sedation.

Elderly people in nursing homes, as well as those receiving care in their homes, told the Royal Commission of their “feelings of frustration, despair and hopelessness’’.

“Their complaints … often go unanswered … people become unwilling to complain for fear that care will become worse,’’ the report says.

The Commissioners lashed out at the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, saying they were “flabbergasted’’ that it had used computer-generated reports in quality audits of nursing homes.

“The same positive words prompted by computers were used over and over again,’’ their report says.

“Computers cannot determine quality; only people can and should do that.’’

The Royal Commission found that the federal Health Department did not publish the number of complaints against nursing homes, or the number of assaults in each home.

Some aged care providers were “defensive and belligerent in their ignorance of what is happening in the facilities for which they are responsible’’, the report says.

Aged and Community Services, the lobby group for non-profit aged care providers, yesterday said it was “no surprise to anyone there are failures’’ and demanded more taxpayer funding.

“We are living longer than ever before and our health needs are increasingly complex – the system wasn’t set up for this,’’ chief executive Patricia Sparrow said.

Leading Age Services Australia, representing aged care providers, said the report was a “beacon for immediate reform’’.

The Royal Commission report says taxpayers provide 80 per cent of funding to the aged care industry, so have “every right to expect that a sector so heavily funded by them should be open and fully accountable to the public and seen as a ‘service’ to them’’.

The Royal Commission will hand down its final recommendations in November next year.

Originally published as Aged Care Royal Commission: ‘Cruel and harmful’ system must change