With a total of 19 residents deaths and 71 staff members and residents testing positive for COVID-19, the situation that unfolded at Anglicare’s Newmarch House has become a case study in what can happen when infection control goes wrong in an Australian aged care home.
The recent Four Corners exposé entitled ‘Like the Plague’ shed some much-needed light on the plight of residents that were forced to remain inside the home and the struggles of resident family members who clamoured to remove their loved ones from the home but were warned that doing so could result in jail and fines of up to $11,000.
Despite being overseen by several government departments and authorities, the catastrophic outcome at Newmarch is set to be the subject of three separate inquiries by the NSW Coroner, the Commonwealth, and the Aged Care Royal Commission.
And questions are now being raised as to how a home that was reported to have been receiving so much assistance continued to deteriorate while under the watch of regulatory bodies.
Following Monday night’s Four Corner’s report, Aged Care Quality and Safety Commissioner, Janet Anderson PSM, released a statement refuting criticism of the Commission’s handling of the outbreak at Newmarch.
Within that statement, Ms Anderson claimed that the Commission had been actively engaged with the Anglican Community Services and management at Newmarch House since the beginning of the outbreak on 1 April 2020.
This process was believed to have involved daily contact with Newmarch House management “through a small interagency forum with health authorities established to coordinate respective roles.”
As problems at Newmarch continued to escalate, the Commission issued a series of regulatory actions with Anglican Community Services including the following:
In addition to appointing the external advisor of the Commission’s choice, Anglicare was also told that it would have to action the advisor’s recommendations and provide regular reports back to the Commission. Anglicare was also told not to admit any new residents into Newmarch House until all risks had been adequately addressed.
The supposed penalty for failing to comply with these demands was the threat of Anglicare having their license to operate revoked by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, which at the time, felt poorly timed given the immediate risks facing residents and the need for more assistance.
At a time when residents and families of Newmarch were asked to put their trust in government departments – gaps in communication between the Department of Health, NSW Health, and the Quality and Safety Commission – failed them miserably.
With Newmarch being a federally funded aged care home, the public could be forgiven for assuming that the Department of Health would be responsible for ensuring the health and wellbeing of those affected by the outbreak.
But the nature of this system, which relies upon a segmented allocation of responsibility between both state and federal health authorities, and the Commission, produces a number of grey areas that routinely fail Australians living in aged care and their families.
At the height of the outbreak at Newmarch, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian revealed that she felt “relieved” that the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission had stepped in to oversee things, and the public assumed that this would result in a tangible improvement to the level of care that residents receive.
Yet after multiple interventions and worsening conditions, it became clear that the Commission’s role as a monitor and regulator was more of a sign that further operational help was needed rather than an indication that things were set to improve.
Following the Four Corners report, The Council on the Ageing (COTA) Australia’s, Chief Executive, Ian Yates, publicly stated that that the report by Four Corners “reinforced the need for the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC) to receive additional powers.”
“The Government is already considering whether the ACQSC has the necessary regulatory powers. We would welcome the ACQSC having a wider range of powers to step in sooner, rather than later, and with a much broader range of tools in its regulatory tool kit,” said Mr Yates.
While there is no doubt that managing a situation as unprecedented and deadly as what was experienced at Newmarch would yield a number of areas of improvement, older Australians deserve a system that doesn’t allow the most important responsibilities to get lost amongst the red tape.
