Horrific case sets off aged care inquiry

Aged care will soon be under the microscope after a NSW woman was found with maggots in her mouth the day before she died.

Shirley Carter died at the Opal Raymond Terrace Gardens nursing home near Newcastle in October last year.

Her daughter Jayne has since called for mandatory reporting standards on these types of incidents after staff revealed they were “embarrassed” following the maggot discovery.

“I kind of went somewhere else,” she told ABC Newcastle.

“Into shock, really, because the only way maggots get places is, they’re attracted to decay, they’re attracted to rotting things.”

When her mother died the next day, Jayne was told to keep quiet by a manager at the nursing home.

“She said to me, ‘Oh, it’s probably better if you don’t say anything to anybody because you know how these kinds of things can be blown out of proportion’.

“I was really angry after that.”

It was only after Jayne complained directly to the Aged Care Complaints Commissioner that Opal offered an apology.

“Yeah, they said they were sorry, and the aged care complaints people said, ‘I think we can put this down to an experience that we’ve all learned from’.

“I thought, you might have learned something but all I’ve learned is that you guys want to keep this hidden.”

Jayne has since raised grave concerns about her mother’s care.

“I went in one afternoon and I saw that her face was in a rictus of pain — on her medical records it said she had pain relief as needed, plus she was on morphine patches for pain,” she said.

“I asked why she hadn’t been given any, and they came in and said yes, she can have some immediately.

“One day one of the nurses came in and suggested that I shake her and yell at her, that’s how they woke her when they wanted to talk to her.”

Opal’s managing director Gary Barnier admitted its high palliative care standards were not followed at the time of Carter’s death.

“Staff were terminated, but it was the management of the home that was terminated,” he said.

“I think she was told to stay quiet by local management, because we identified, through our own investigations, a culture of trying to keep matters hidden.”

Barnier said the maggot allegations were unproven but he would not refute the allegations and the company would in fact welcome an inquest into Carter’s death.

However, Jayne Carter said she wanted a deeper look in to how the sector was being overseen.

“I would really like an investigation into aged care,” she said.

“They’re not isolated cases and we need to have some kind of watchdog on them, because look how much people are getting away with.”

Do you think aged care providers need to be held more accountable?