Yahoo News Aged care watchdog takes action against Epping Gardens home after Covid-19 outbreak
The aged care regulator has taken action against the Epping Gardens home in Melbourne where a total of 123 people have tested positive for coronavirus, with the watchdog finding there was a “severe and immediate risk to residents”.
Sources said more than a dozen residents had now been transferred to hospital as more harrowing stories of alleged patient mistreatment emerged from the home.
The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission said it found on Tuesday that Epping Gardens, which is owned by private operator Heritage Care, had breached care and management standards. Epping Gardens is now under the control of staff from Victorian health authority Austin Health, which covers Melbourne’s north-east.
“When Covid-19 became a thing I had grave concerns for the people in Epping Gardens,” Robyn Scipione, the daughter-in-law of a former resident, told Guardian Australia on Friday.
“The staff in there aren’t trained to wash a resident properly or make a phone call, let alone care for them in a pandemic.”
Epping Gardens is one of four facilities where state or federal health authorities have taken control in response to a coronavirus crisis gripping the private aged care industry.
The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said on Friday that 928 coronavirus cases in the state were linked to aged care.
“In very broad terms, there is a stability that’s come to those four or five crisis sites, certainly the four that we have talked a lot about,” he said.
At its last audit of Epping Gardens in late January, the quality and safety commission gave the home a clean bill of health, finding it complied with all 44 aged care standards.
But on Tuesday, the commission found Epping Gardens in breach of 16 standards, including requirements that residents get safe and effective clinical care, that there be “effective management of high-impact or high-prevalence risks” and that the risk of infection be minimised.
The commission said other standards being breached included a requirement to have systems in place for “identifying and responding to abuse and neglect of consumers”.
It ordered Heritage Gardens not to admit any new residents and appoint an adviser, at its expense, “to assist it to comply with its responsibilities”.
A federal health department spokeswoman said the order was made “as it was determined there was severe and immediate risk to residents”.
Scipione said she moved her mother-in-law, Joyce, out of Epping Gardens three days after she moved into the facility after a series of “horrendous failings at every level” in caring for her.
The 76-year-old had pancreatic cancer and a brain tumour when she moved into the facility at the end of December 2019. Her family had been persuaded by Joyce’s doctors an aged care facility would be better than palliative care, provided she had organised an acute pain relief plan so her pancreatic pain could be efficiently treated.
Scipione said that one day after moving into the home, carers rang the family to inform them she was suffering pain and they couldn’t treat her because she didn’t have a relief plan.
When her family rushed to the facility to be with her during the pain, they learned she had not been washed once since arriving at the facility – which carers said was because they didn’t have an appropriate shower chair for her.
“I spent 12 hours advocating for the pain relief plan to be followed but the carers couldn’t understand me,” Scipione said.
She said staff were also unable to call an ambulance for Joyce because they didn’t speak enough English.
“When I finally called the ambulance they could hear her writhing in pain in the background,” she said.
Scipione said she reported Epping Gardens to the aged care commission on 14 January – a week before its audit – after directors failed to attend a meeting she called to express her concerns about her mother’s care.
The Guardian has spoken to several family members of different residents who have claimed carers at the facility were often unable to understand important terms or instructions about the care residents required.
Meals were sometimes left at the door of residents who were unable to move and subsequently collected uneaten.
The Heritage Care chief executive, Greg Reeve, has been contacted for comment.
The aged care commissioner, Janet Anderson, said the commission was using its full powers to combat the coronavirus crisis gripping homes.
“In relation to Epping Gardens, the commission has issued the service with a notice to agree, which outlines a number of actions the service must take in order to avoid further compliance action including the imposition of sanctions,” she said.
“The Aged Care Act clearly sets out the responsibilities and obligations of approved providers, and the commission is engaging with the approved provider to hold them to account.”
She said that in January the commission found another facility suffering from an outbreak, Baptcare Wyndham Lodge in Werribee, “non-compliant with a requirement of the aged care quality standards” but did not publish its report on its website.
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The commission also visited Gary Smorgon House in Caulfield, which has reported one Covid-19 case in a kitchen worker, on 30 June “following concerns raised with the commission,” Anderson said.
Meanwhile, the Victorian chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, defended his decision to intervene at St Basil’s in Fawkner, which has recorded more than 110 coronavirus cases, by replacing its staff and evacuating positive residents to hospital.
The chairman of St Basil’s, Kon Kontis, attacked the decision on Friday, telling the Age that he told state health officials to “let me look after them – let them die with dignity if they are going to die from this disease”.
Sutton said that without intervention more St Basil’s staff “were going to become positive by the coming days”.
“That’s just more and more residents exposed and infected and dying,” he said.
“I have absolutely no regrets about writing to St Basil’s to say that they needed to change that workforce.”
