By Lynda Saltarelli, The Age
Australia
November 18, 2007
Several years ago my father suffered a debilitating stroke and was admitted to hospital. No longer classified as needing acute care by the hospital, we were told that dad should be moved to a nursing home. The hospital began to pressure my emotionally and physically exhausted family to do the impossible and find him a bed.Fourteen weeks after entering hospital, my father contracted bedsores and died as a result of septicaemia.
Our Government boasts about the "booming" economy, but many frail Australians live in totally unacceptable conditions. Not even reasonably wealthy baby boomers will be able to lobby for good aged-care when they themselves are frail.
There is evidence that residents of aged-care facilities regularly go without proper pain relief and palliative care. Failures include poor infection control, inadequate clinical care, failure to provide safe medication management, and inappropriate use of physical and chemical restraints.A recent report For Their Sake — which surveyed staff from 371 nursing homes — was commissioned by the Aged Care Association Australia, following complaints from staff about poor hospital treatment.
- It found nursing home residents suffered "severe weight loss" in hospitals because of "inappropriate food and food preparation", "no feeding assistance for people with a disability" and "no monitoring of food eaten or left by patients".
- Some patients, who were previously without skin conditions, were returned to their nursing homes with skin tears, bed sores and bruising from rough handling.
Melbourne's Austin Health Hospital aged-care director, Michael Woodward, states "people were dying of malnutrition in nursing homes across Australia".
The devil is certainly in the detail — political parties have yet to respond with policies that tackle many of the following unresolved issues in Australia's aged-care system:
■Greater accountability for the treatment and care of older and frail citizens in aged-care facilities.
■Many homes simply fail to employ enough staff to sufficiently feed, clean and care for the elderly.
■Increase the level of transparency within the accreditation system for consumers — accreditation measures what providers say they do and not the standard of care they actually deliver.
■Families often feel frustrated by their inability to obtain the latest reports from the Aged Care Standards and Accreditation Agency website when seeking aged-care placement for family. They can sometimes take months, with older reports no longer made available. (Older reports can also highlight repeat offenders — case in point, recently sanctioned and closed Belvedere Nursing Home.)
■Spot checks should occur at varying hours of the day and night.Fear of retribution is one of the biggest and unaddressed reasons for the failure of all the reinvented complaints schemes. Staff fear for their jobs, and relatives are reluctant to complain fearing the care of their loved ones may be compromised.
Abridged Article Source
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Thank you Lynda for speaking out for the rest of us. A group of us have written emails to members if parliament; and spoken out on radio shows etc. on this same issue and that of Elder Abuse. What has to happened before our politicians take notice?
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