Hidden toll in hell homes

Attacks 10 times worse than in official reports

MORE than 100 vulnerable elderly Australians are being raped, assaulted and even murdered in residential aged care facilities every week. But a News Corp Aged Care 360 investigation can reveal the real number of victims could be as much as 10 times higher.

The federal health department received 5233 notifications of assaults in aged-care homes last year – a 30 per cent increase on the previous year. It included 739 cases of unlawful sexual contact.

But many other assaults go unreported, and by law agedcare homes don’t have to report them if they are done by someone with dementia.

In a report for the federal government, accounting and auditing firm KPMG estimates the real rate of these incidents is 10 times higher – with unreported incidents likely to be at 52,000 per year.

News Corp Australia this week launched Aged Care 360, a special investigation bringing experts, those on the frontline and the families of those in aged care together to dissect the sorry mess and offer solutions.

Monash University’s Head of Health Law and Ageing Research Unit, Joseph Ibrahim – who is a member of News Corp’s Aged Care 360 expert panel – trawled the Victorian coroner’s data to uncover a string of 28 deaths where people with dementia in aged care facilities became confused and argued with each other, and someone ended up dead.

Other research he was involved with explored how police and nursing homes failed to take action when elderly women in aged care facilities were sexually abused.

“I’m ashamed that I was really slow to pick up on the concept that sexual abuse was occurring to older women … older women aren’t listened to,” Professor Ibrahim said.

Rapes and murders are not the only problems. One agedcare nurse told News Corp that residents in her facility had maggots in their wounds, their incontinence pads were rationed to just three per day and some residents were not showered regularly.

A third of residents are zoned out on antipsychotics, a form of chemical restraint, a study by Macquarie University’s Dr Kimberley Lind found. And many

of them are also physically restrained in chairs, using straps.

Advocacy group Aged Care Crisis said: “Aged-care residents in nursing homes have been raped, robbed, bathed in kerosene, attacked by rodents, burnt to death, strangled, cooked, melted, sedated to death, overmedicated or choked to death.”

Pain Australia CEO Carol Bennett, who is also on the Aged Care 360 panel, said she quit the Aged Care Quality Advisory Council because “the focus was not about quality at all – it just really fell short of the mark”.