A Royal Commission has found damning evidence of widespread abuse, neglect and total failure of the system. The findings are nothing less than repulsive.
The current state of the findings is pretty much the latest crop of atrocities that people have known about for years. Complaints were endless, responses were woefully inadequate. Getting anyone to look at the problems, however, took decades.
Some of these old aged concentration camps barely deserve to be called chicken coops. Disgusting battery chicken abuses, in fact, have had about as much publicity as aged care in recent years. Despite the massive impact on so many people, not much has changed. The Banking Royal Commission received about 8 times more coverage than aged care. That rather obvious fact hasn’t gone down well with the many Australians trying to get justice for their parents and grandparents.
The stories are horrendous. Not much has changed there, either. The Commission’s working description of the aged care system is “neglect”, the single word which says it all.
A sector and a system without a soul
Truly weird, and inexcusable, is that stories of aged care atrocities are literally unavoidable. I remember 20 years ago an old man with leg ulcers was “cured” by putting his ulcerated legs in a tin of kerosene. Imagine dear old gran getting treated like that, and this sort of imbecility is standard information.
Notable among the total sector meltdown is that some aged care centres don’t seem to have these issues. They have sane carers, sane managers, and outcomes seem pretty good. The problem is that these centres are very much in a minority against the roaring tides of incompetence and virtual criminality in the abuse cases.
You don’t usually get much news when something goes right, so people doing things properly in aged care are also being largely ignored. The question is why some centres can do things right, while so many others obviously can’t.
Why treating people like that is in any way acceptable to anyone is an interesting question. The answer is likely to be equally revolting. Governments supposed to be regulating have done very little, as you may have gathered.
The deregulation mania of the last 40 years has come to roost in a saga of unrelenting failure in the aged care centres. Australia’s constipated approach to regulation rarely if ever considers the reasons for regulation; the issue is not spending money on it, in most cases.
The most basic ethical standards haven’t been considered, let alone applied at any level. The “duty of care” is rarely mentioned, and if it was, there wouldn’t be many examples.
Silver bullets for the legal machine guns
People also pay very large amounts of money to have their family members abused. Cost of aged care is truly astronomical in dollar terms. You can pay a fortune to have your loved ones put down inhumanely anywhere in Australia, apparently.
It’s a no-brainer that when big money flies around anywhere, the trash move in to that sector. This seems to be the case with aged care, where good stories are virtually non-existent, but the horrors are everywhere.
For example;
• Very cheap food, barely airline standard, and sometimes reused after being partly eaten. Nutrition? Not much, if at all.
• People left in beds in their own waste for days. Basic hygiene violations are very common.
• Actual assault and abuse by “carers”. Too many cases to count. These are effectively criminal assaults by any possible interpretation.
• Ongoing serious medical conditions allowed to drag on without treatment. This seems to be standard practice for many centres.
• Etc., etc. These and variations could fill a library.
So what can you do about it? Sue the genome out of each and every one of these filthy ratholes. Every cent. Every future cent. Enforce charges of assault. (What court is going to say assault isn’t assault?) Bankrupt the equally filthy bastards in endless litigation, however fully justified. Create enough legal precedents to make this type of “care’ suicide for those doing it.
Then you can have a few thoughtful jail terms. The pity of it is that the offenders would live better in jail than the residents in Australia’s aged care extermination camps.
Pro bono lawyers, sharpen your machetes and class actions. Families, get your evidence. The Royal Commission has provided plenty of evidence. This is Australia in the 21st century, not the Stone Age. These abuses cannot be permitted to exist. Get on with it and exterminate these bastards.
