DISABLED TEEN
A FACILITY’S CLOSURE COULD BE DIRE FOR YOUNG PATIENTS
‘I don’t belong in a rest home’
When aspiring jockey Sophia Malthus was left paralysed after falling from a bolting horse, she could have been placed in an aged-care home while adjusting to the life-changing injury.
Thankfully, the then 19-yearold was able to secure a place at Auckland’s Laura Fergusson Rehabilitation centre, built especially for people with disabilities to help transition them back into the community.
But Sophia fears that experience will be lost for other young people, with the facility quietly closing down in March last year, amid talk of it not being financially sustainable.
Built in the late ‘60s, the centre aimed to give young disabled adults independence and stop them being confined to rest homes or psychiatric institutions because there was nowhere else for them to go.
The Greenlane-based property had 45 purposebuilt units, some housing intellectually disabled people who lived there permanently and who have since been moved to rest homes while the units sit empty.
Now, with the support of her step-sister Julia Davies and aunty Victoria Carter, Sophia is fighting the closure and rallying the government to intervene in the centre’s impending sale.
“It would be a tragedy if this facility is allowed to fold,” says the 23-year-old law student, who has lost most sensation from the
collarbone down and is in a wheelchair. “If I’d been put in a rest home at 19, it would have affected not just my physical health but my mental health, too.
“I could have been suicidal. Coming to terms with an injury such as my own is already incredibly difficult and it is absolutely inappropriate to expect young people to go through this change while living in aged-care facilities.”
Adds Victoria, “Rest homes aren’t designed to rehabilitate people and integrate them back into the community. People going into a rest home are not making a plan to leave.”
After Sophia’s fall in 2016, in which she broke her neck, she spent three months in the spinal ward at Middlemore Hospital, before moving to Laura Fergusson while her parents built her a wheelchair-friendly cabin on their property.
She describes her nine months there as invaluable, with physios, occupational therapists and doctors always available. Ramps and automatic doors made life accessible again, along with a special-needs gym and a hydrotherapy pool heated to 37 degrees – a must for people with spinal cord injuries who often can’t regulate body temperature.
“They have everything for the disabled to teach you how to do it when you go home,” says Sophia. “It was really good for my confidence and also my understanding of disability.”
Most importantly, Sophia says she was with others going through similar experiences.
“There was a group of us ‘spinal people’ who would eat our meals together or hang out in the gym. It was a community and I needed that social aspect.”
Julia, 29, works in advertising and was living in London when
she got the call about Sophia’s devastating accident.
“Knowing that my sister was in a place getting the appropriate care she needed took away an added layer of stress,” recalls Julia. “I can’t imagine the anguish if she had been put in a rest home.”
When the Weekly chats to the tight-knit trio, they’re full of chatter about a protest rally they organised with Epsom MP and ACT Party leader David Seymour. Around 200 former Laura Fergusson staff, patients and members of the local community turned up with placards to show their support.
Says Victoria, 54, “The current trustees may have a legal right to permanently sell this facility out from under those who need it, but they do not have a moral right.”
Other Laura Fergusson centres are run in Waikato, Whanganui, Wellington and
Canterbury. She says the Auckland facility was built with “millions of dollars fundraised by the Ladies Auxiliary” – a women’s committee started in 1965 by Mary Caughey and Laura Fergusson.
The women recently flew to Wellington to raise awareness of the closure at Parliament. Several days later, the Laura Fergusson Trustees agreed to meet with the Ministry of Health about its financial problems.
Victoria says it was what they had hoped for. “We were so pleased to hear the Associate Minister of Health, Dr Ayesha Verrall, say the Government would like to have further discussions with the Trust. It was less pleasing to read the Board say they would meet but only to correct the facts!
“Surely when the Government says it wants to help, the Board would welcome this. They’ve been claiming lack of interest and funding from the Ministry. If they refuse this help, maybe they need to reconsider their roles and let people step up who want to see Lady Fergusson’s vision live on.” #
‘If I’d been put in a rest home at 19, it would have affected my mental health’