Fight for fair aged care
Campaigner still on mission for industry revamp
THE announcement there would be a Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety was greeted with unabashed delight by South Australian Senior of the Year and aged care reform campaigner Barbara Spriggs.
It was her work, fuelled by her husband’s experience, that led her to exposing the atrocities at the Oakden Older Person’s Mental Health Services facility that started the distressing tale of institutional neglect in aged care venues across Australia.
“I just felt ‘Wow, I can’t believe this’,” an emotional Barbara said when her son contacted her with the news.
“Finally, the enormity of the situation is being recognised,” she said.
“It needed to be done. This is a huge step forward. It’s a real wake-up call to what has been going on. We need to make people more accountable and let Australians know these people aren’t able to get away with the things that have been going on.”
Barbara wants the Royal Commission to address two key areas – staffing and prosecution of abuse offenders.
“Finding the right people, training them properly, paying them properly and making them more accountable so that they are doing the right thing by the people in aged care,” she said. “They should hand-pick the right staff.”
She also wants the commission to deal with people who have done wrong.
“They should lose the right to work in any aged care facilities anywhere in Australia. If they are dismissed from one aged care place, they should be stopped from working in another in that state or any other state. The system doesn’t allow this.”
It was more than 10 years ago when Barbara started to realise her husband Bob was being chemically and physically restrained at the Oakden facility. Bob was accommodated there because of his Parkinson’s disease and other complex health issues.
It was her absolute determination to find answers and for the public to be made aware of the crisis that led to an Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry.
The damning inquiry chronicled abuse of patients at Oakden and finally led to it being permanently closed in September last year. But the story didn’t end there. In the past month several game-changing Federal Government aged care funding and administrative changes have also been announced. The Royal Commission is the next step in the change process.
Barbara is watching from afar the immediate responses to the commission as she continues to rebuild her emotional strength. She has been on holiday in England, but still not removed from the Australian stories, nor from local ones.
Her ear is currently tuned to stories about aged care facilities in the UK. Her brother was in one while he was dying of a brain tumour.
“It was a good home,” she said. The ratio of staff to patients was higher than she has seen in Australian facilities.
While she doesn’t have any involvement with the Royal Commission, Barbara wants to continue helping to make a difference in the state of aged care in Australia.
“The journey will be hard, but the destination will be worthwhile,” Barbara said.