Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aged Care, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Hansard source

The issues that have been raised over the last eight or nine days are certainly matters of public importance. The stories we have heard—and unfortunately they keep coming on—have rocked this nation. Not since 2000, when we heard the stories of the kerosene baths, has aged care been brought into question in the way that these allegations of sexual and elder abuse have done so. First of all you will recall that allegations were made that four women, all suffering from dementia, were allegedly sexually assaulted at the George Vowell centre in Melbourne in a six-month period between June and November of last year. What I think appals most people about this is that those events happened over such a long period of time. The family of one of the alleged victims—who was given the name ‘Anna’—was informed in December of 2005 by the police of three alleged rapes over what could have been a six-month period. The alleged assailant had also assaulted three other women.

The concerning issue in this particular case is that apparently—and this has not been confirmed by the Minister for Ageing although we have asked him—one of the assaults was witnessed by a staff member and that staff member did not report what had been seen. That is the issue that I think concerns most people. What happens in a facility that allows a situation to occur where the normal human behaviour that anyone would have after witnessing such an event was not followed? Why is it that the person who witnessed this event was so threatened or so cajoled—whatever it was—into not reporting what any person should know was a police matter right at that very minute? We do know that the alleged assailant has been sacked. We cannot confirm—because the minister will not confirm it—that the person who allegedly saw the event but did not report it has been sacked. But the other concerning part of this story is that another staff member who apparently witnessed the event was also sacked. That person did report it, apparently, on the day that she witnessed it but this woman has also been sacked. The minister needs to confirm whether or not that is, in fact, the case.

Then we heard of the events at Immanuel Gardens where an aged care worker was sacked after allegations of abuse in October 2005. He had allegedly inappropriately touched several residents of the facility and had used vulgar language. I can say that the home did respond promptly to these allegations—the staff member was immediately stood down and then dismissed, and the home is assisting police with their investigations. The facility did the right thing and immediately contacted the families of all of the female residents involved and provided the Department of Health and Ageing with a full briefing. But that was in October 2005. We only find out this information when people bring it to the public eye, and that is not appropriate.

Then this week we have heard further allegations. We know that a woman has raised issues that affected her mother in a facility called Millward in Victoria. Her mother made claims of sexual abuse two years ago at this Millward aged care facility. However, rather than contacting the police or her family, the director of nursing forced the person who was alleging she had been assaulted to confront her attacker. I have never heard of a more appalling situation and a more inappropriate way of dealing with the reporting of sexual abuse. Anyone who has done any work in sexual abuse knows that you do not force someone, especially an elderly woman with a brain injury, to sit in front of her alleged attacker and confront the issue. Naturally, the alleged perpetrator denied it. I do not know how many senators actually saw the report on Lateline, but to watch an elderly woman say, ‘I am not a liar’ I think has affected us all.

We have also heard now—and this is the fourth incident—that allegations of rape of a 73-year-old woman, also with dementia, were made to the staff of an unnamed aged care facility in March of 2005, and nine months later the police were alerted. Late last year another female resident of the same unnamed facility also made sexual assault claims and they were investigated by the police, but the first allegation was only investigated when there was a second set of allegations. These are appalling allegations. It is very concerning to the community. The reason I have proposed this matter of public importance today is to say that yes, we do need to recognise that these allegations of sexual abuse in residential aged care facilities do need to be treated as a matter of national priority. But I am also urging the Minister for Ageing, Senator Santoro, to restore the public confidence in residential aged care in Australia by first of all investigating the claims and reporting openly on the findings.

Confidence in aged care has to be restored. We cannot sit around and wait for three weeks for an urgent meeting. It started out being an urgent summit but has turned over the last eight days into a meeting that is going to happen three weeks after the first allegations were made. It is not a special summit of people who have been collected together because of their particular expertise in this matter; it is the ministerial advisory committee on aged care. That is a reasonable committee, but none of the members of that committee have specific responsibility for advocating on behalf of residents in residential aged care. All of the people who are members of that committee are very talented and do have a lot of experience to add to this issue, but none of them are specifically advocates of residents in aged care. None of them have had a lot of experience in the issue of elder abuse, although many of them have had a lot of experience in aged care itself.

It is my view that that response from the minister—and that has been the only response from the minister, except to say, ‘We’ll have departmental investigations’—is not enough to restore public confidence in residential aged care. People will not be comforted by the fact that we will have a meeting to talk about the events that have unfolded. The management of crises in confidence requires three actions. Firstly, it requires immediate action. Secondly, it requires openness and transparency. Thirdly, it requires a confirmation of confidence in the systems that are in place now to ensure quality and safety of care of residents in residential aged care.

None of those three conditions have been met. There has not been immediate action. We are going to have a meeting three weeks from the first allegation. There is no openness and transparency. We have directed a series of questions to the minister this week, and he has said that he is disturbed, worried and troubled by it. Minister, we all are. Every Australian is, but you are the Minister for Ageing in Australia and you have a responsibility to ensure that the systems are in place and that you can be open and clear in response to what has happened. We as a community need to understand what has happened and how the minister is going to deal with it. We also need confirmation of confidence in the systems that are in place. On two occasions we have asked the minister to confirm that he is confident that the aged care accreditation system, the complaints resolution scheme and his department are up to the job of delivering what he is expecting, and he has declined to annunciate that confidence. I am afraid that the minister is failing on all three counts.

Let us go to the complaints resolution scheme. The complaints resolution scheme is a system established so that people who have concerns about what is happening in aged care have a method of dealing with it. When the Senate Community Affairs References Committee looked at the question of aged care in late 2004 and 2005, the issue of the bureaucratic nature of the complaints system was raised by many people. People were uncomfortable with the process. They found it difficult to navigate. They became disheartened and disillusioned about their ability to get a proper resolution out of the system. Our committee made a very good recommendation: that the complaints resolution scheme should be reviewed with a view to making it more user-friendly, to paraphrase the recommendation.

The other evidence we received during that inquiry was about the reason people do not go to the complaints resolution scheme—that is, not only the fear of retribution but also actual retribution. The Commissioner for Complaints raised this issue himself in his annual report of 2002-03. He said:

Many discussions with relatives and friends of care recipients reveal an obvious and pervasive attitude—one where there is an expressed anxiety not to make a fuss, not to complain, not to inquire too often and not to be noticed for fear that it would reflect badly on their relative and lead to some kind of retribution.

We know that there were 6,000 complaints received last year. How many would there be if there was a system in place that ensured that people who want to complain did not fear, or did not experience, retribution? That is an issue that has to be dealt with. Our committee recommended that the Commissioner for Complaints conduct an investigation into the nature and extent of retribution and intimidation of residents in aged care facilities and their families, including the need for a national strategy to address this issue. As we all know, this report came down in June last year, and we are still waiting for a response. There were 51 recommendations in this report. It was a unanimous report. That means that coalition senators supported the recommendations that the committee made. We are still waiting for a response.

The issues that we covered in that report, if they had been addressed at the time, would have allowed the minister to restore the confidence in aged care that our system is desperately crying out for. What we have is a system where every single aged care provider’s service has been brought into question. A number of people who provide aged care have rung me and said: ‘This is a problem. We have to restore the confidence in the system.’ The number of phone calls that they are receiving from family members concerned about their relatives has increased. That is predictable. The minister needs to intervene now to make sure that confidence in the system can be restored.

Let us get the CRS, the complaints resolution scheme, working. Let us make sure that people feel that, if they have a complaint, they can take it to the resolution scheme and get some action from that system without fear of retribution. The other system that is in place that the minister has not felt it in himself to say that he thinks is working very well is the accreditation system. During our inquiry, there were many complaints, both from the providers and from resident advocates, about the nature of the accreditation system and the fact that it needs an overhaul. There are recommendations in the Senate inquiry report to that effect.

Over the last 12 months or so that I have been the shadow minister for ageing, it has become evident to me that the use of sanctions by the agency and the department has changed. The period from when the inspections are done to when the sanctions are applied seems to be much longer. We found that with Immanuel Gardens, one of the facilities that were referred to last week where allegations of abuse have occurred. There were inspections of Immanuel Gardens in July, August and December of last year. Those reports identified that Immanuel Gardens had had ongoing noncompliance for the previous three years. It is very clear from the reports that there is something fundamentally wrong with this facility, and we just got a sanction on 9 February. (Time expired)