‘Covid-19 exposed shambolic aged care, but it’s been decades in the making’

When I saw the sign in the window I couldn’t help wondering: “Is this the Australia I have known for 75 years? Is this the lucky country that for a century was at the forefront among
civilised nations in knowing how to treat people properly?

“Is this the same country that adopted secret voting in elections, an initiative so ground-breaking that for decades it was known throughout the Western world as ‘the Australian ballot’? And is this the country that adopted full employment as a national policy in 1945 when greater countries than ours were still talking about it or dragging their feet?”

For what I was seeing was one elderly person, who almost certainly had spent a life of hard work, of service to their families and their communities, and who had probably never done
anything particularly wrong. Yet was now virtually imprisoned, cut off from their loved ones and facing a very uncertain future. Yet so frightened and alone that their only recourse was
a desperate sign in a window, pleading “HELP”. Was this really Australia? I asked myself.

It is about six years since the last close relative of my parents’ generation went into aged care. And what a sorry tale that was. From the first brain aneurism in her home in 2001 to
her final passing in an aged-care facility in 2014, it was struggle, struggle, struggle all the way. Struggle against imperious medical professionals who wanted to impose their own
expedient priorities on her. Struggle against careless administrators prepared to say anything to kick her out of badly needed hospital beds to face alone whatever fate had in
store for her.

Struggle against medication that was never requested nor agreed to. Struggle against bullying into one-size-fits-all therapy sessions. Struggle against abominable, inedible food.
(Such as, to be handed a lunch of one lonely frankfurter when she had never eaten a frankfurter in her entire life before.) Struggle simply to survive in a terrifyingly foreign environment because of low staffing ratios. And thus the saga went on, to be summed up in the observation of my close relative: “Unless you’re at the aged-care home 24/7, to watch over your own nearest and dearest, your parent, especially if they are shy and reserved, has no say in what happens to them.”

But that was six years ago and I was willing to accept that things might have improved when I was considering writing this blogpost. Therefore, I called up the Four Corners investigation Like the Plague (ABC iview) into the nursing home debacle at Newmarch House in the outer western Sydney suburb of Kingswood.

And what a sorry tale that was as well. Of how a bunch of ordinary Australians who had placed their elderly parents in aged care for their safety and wellbeing – and done so in
good faith – were appalled to find that they were constantly kept in the dark.

That they were told nothing. That they could not visit their loved ones, even when they were near death. That there was no separation of negative Covid-19 cases from the positive. Nor any apprehension that an early transfer to a properly equipped hospital might be in the patients’ best interests. That there was a grave suspicion the staff were not being monitored closely enough to ensure that the disease was not being imported into the facility from employment
elsewhere. (Thanks to the “gig” economy.)

Yet when the anxiety of those families finally impressed itself on the administrators, their first response was, apparently, to erect a screened barrier so that the families were then
totally incapable of seeing their loved ones, even through a distant window. As one family member told the interviewer, this was “a corporate response not a humanitarian” one.

And what could be more damning than when the scale of infection became clear, the managers brought a clutch of qualified nurses into the facility, when, in my opinion, they
should have been there all along. And, to add salt to the wound, one resident was eventually able to contact a family member outside to say she had been locked in her room,
alone, with a single peanut butter sandwich for company!

It was hardly a surprise, then, that not a single person in authority, from any level, right up to the state minister for health, was willing to front the cameras and answer the questions
that the program so obviously prompted.

By contrast, when I cast my mind back over very recent years to the citizenship ceremonies held every January to welcome newcomers to this country, you see the ground is always
thick with welcoming politicians, grinning and shaking hands and posing for the cameras.

As has been said, Victory has a thousand fathers, Defeat is a poor, bloody orphan. Why then, I would like to know, is it that the elderly of Australia, in the last lap of a productive life, are treated in so appalling a fashion that their citizenship would be better described as merely second-class? Could someone tell me, please, why people who no longer work and who no longer contribute to the almighty GDP have to suffer abuse and indignity on this scale? To the point, in some cases, of death?

The truth, of course, is that Covid-19 did not fall upon the aged-care sector like a wolf on the fold. We all knew, in our bones, that the system was weakened – the endless government
cost-cutting and the stripping back of adequate, qualified staffing levels, could have no other outcome – but we hoped it was not so severe. Covid-19 has stripped that delusion
bare.

Which leaves us with the inevitable question: What now? Is there anyone out there, after Newmarch House and the pandemic sweeping Victoria, who remains confident that the
bugs will be ironed out so that you can place your nearest and dearest in an aged-care facility with complete confidence? And what happens when we, ourselves, are faced with
the same Hobson’s choice? Would we be similarly confident to place our own lives in the long-term care of the Australian aged-care “industry” in its present state?

Having thought about all this, I have to say I feel very uneasy about the next few years of my life. I don’t want to be a burden on my family and I don’t want to be a cause for their
anxiety. But nor do I want to be dismissed as a waste of space in my twilight years. Is it too much to ask that we, the elderly, be treated as deserving citizens instead of as a red-ink
entry in the national economic accounts?