Nurse who tied elderly patient to bed avoids suspension

A Victorian aged care nurse has avoided suspension after she tied an elderly patient to her bed and left her alone for hours.

Taruna Mehta was on 12-hour hospital shift in the Dandenong region when she became frustrated with a female patient, who was over the age of 100, according to an AAP report on Yahoo News.

Mehta used the patient’s bedsheets to tie her to the bed during one-on-one care.

The woman was found in a distressed state at about 3:30am when a doctor came into the room to check on her. She was suffering a urinary tract infection and asked to use the toilet, a tribunal into the incident heard.

When the doctor confronted Mehta, she reportedly told him she was “just too tired” to deal with the woman. The doctor later filed a report on the incident.

Although the Australian Health Practitioners Registration Authority was pushing for Mehta’s suspension, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal decided her otherwise clean record was enough to let her off without consequence.

It’s just the latest incident in a long line of reports of abuse and neglect by staff at aged care facilities across the country.

In one of the most shocking cases of neglect, an elderly woman at the Opal Raymond Terrace Gardens nursing home near Newcastle, was found with maggots in her mouth just one day before she died.

When her daughter raised the issue with staff she was told to forget it and not report the foul finding to authorities because it could get “blown out of proportion”.

In an effort to tackle the issue in aged care home across the country, the Turnbull government announced last year it was creating an “an expert taskforce to develop a wide-ranging workforce strategy, focused on supporting safe, quality aged care for senior Australians”.

“Everything is on the table but there are only two things that matter: safety and quality,” Ken Wyatt, Minister for Aged Care, said of the initiative.

According to Wyatt, the taskforce will reach out to senior Australians and their families, as well as consumer organisations, informal carers, aged care workers and volunteers in the sector. Unions, universities, health professionals and disability advocates will also be part of the discovery process.

Would you feel safe putting your family members in an aged care home? Would you be comfortable living in one?