30 May, 2010
ELDERLY patients in nursing homes are being fed cold and inedible food, left sitting in urine and faeces and subjected to cruel and at times inhumane treatment from overworked and underresourced carers.
The Sunday Telegraph worked undercover inside two metropolitan nursing homes for three weeks and found that some of Sydney’s most vulnerable citizens are being mistreated and left to die inside sterile, cold and smelly aged-care facilities.
The high-care homes – run by Bupa Care Services and Domain Principal Group and overseen by the federal Government – advertise superior aged-care offering personal support and respect for the elderly.
However, many miserable, despondent and desperately lonely residents, who pay 85 per cent of their $671.90 fortnightly pension, live in often despicable conditions and are treated with disrespect. Frail but mentally sound residents talked about being “scared”, “lonely” and “waiting to die”.
The Sunday Telegraph witnessed over the course of a month the crisis in our aged-care facilities first hand – nursing homes understaffed and clearly incapable of caring for a mix of elderly residents, some suffering severe dementia, and younger mentally ill patients.
The Sunday Telegraph saw:
- Frail residents incapable of feeding themselves left to negotiate often cold, unappetising meals or left to go hungry.
- Overworked carers ignoring pleas for help to eat, provide blankets or help residents to the toilet or change incontinence pads.
- Patients left sitting in soaking pads, uncleaned for hours, or humiliated when not helped to the toilet quickly.
- Severe lapses in hygiene where staff rush between patients without cleaning hands.
- One worker handling a resident’s head while wearing rubber gloves donned to clean toilets.
- Immobile residents routinely left alone and forced to fend for themselves. Emergency alarm buttons deliberately left out of reach of bed-bound residents.
- Pleas for medical help following falls ignored, brushed off by busy carers who struggle to meet the demands of difficult patients.
- Workers ordered to keep families in the dark about conditions, in the homes, including injuries.
- Elderly residents with overgrown and yellow toenails.
- Troublesome residents, suffering dementia or other mental illness, heavily medicated to make them more manageable.
The Sunday Telegraph also witnessed moments of intense hostility, and at times violence, among patients. There were several examples of hostile interaction between residents and carers.
The majority of carers are migrants with a poor grasp of English and unable to communicate effectively with patients.
“I just can’t cope”
At a smaller nursing home in Sydney’s inner west, some of the 55 residents were treated with disrespect by staff who belittled and patronised them. “This one is a pain in the arse,” one nurse said in front of the 52-year-old woman she was referring to.
Residents’ complaints of neglect and fears of dying fell on deaf ears at the facility whose director of nursing would retort with a laugh: “Why don’t you leave?”
Residents recovering from physical injuries were also given little rehabilitation. Most are left for hours in front of TVs or listening to music on repeat.
Neither of the suburban nursing homes where The Sunday Telegraph spent three weeks working undercover as a volunteer carer have ever been warned by the federal Government’s aged-care watchdog.
British-based Bupa, a not-for-profit organisation, earned $12 billion in revenue worldwide last year. DPG is Australia’s largest privately owned aged-care provider with more than 58 facilities.
The Sunday Telegraph spent six days at the Bupa facility which houses 90 residents as young as 34. The daily care is provided by 15 nursing assistants, who shower, shave, toilet, feed and dress some eight patients each.
Abridged
SOURCE: Senior Home Care Information
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1 comment:
It's terrible to think things like this go on.
A moving post to say the least.
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