Carol Altmann – The Terrier
This week will be a reckoning for aged care across Australia and I can hope it blows the lid right off what is a national disgrace.
We only have to look at our own neck of the woods to see how little official outrage there is to what should be unacceptable.
It’s more than two months since The Terrier revealed an outbreak of scabies within Lyndoch Living, our much-loved, community-owned aged care home in Warrnambool.
When whistleblowers revealed scabies in a Whyalla nursing home last November, A Current Affair and a South Australian MP were on the doorstep demanding answers.
It’s also more than a year since I wrote about staff tearing up sheets and towels to use as facewashers, and more money being spent on consultants and lawyers than on food for residents.
More than a year has passed since I revealed a family member of a resident was sleeping on the floor next to her mother for seven days because her mother had had a series of falls and there was not enough staff to keep an eye on her.
At the same time, Lyndoch senior staff, right up to the CEO, and senior board members, were attending the May Races.
It’s also a year since a leaked copy of a staff survey revealed serious allegations of bullying and intimidation at Lyndoch that went right to the very top.
It’s well over a year since I first wrote about the steady stream of staff who were leaving Lyndoch, sometimes after decades of service, because of alleged bullying, being “targeted”, or given little option to resign and – if they are lucky – given a payout to sweeten the blow. I call it “keep quiet” money.
Is that sort of thing still happening? Yes.Yes, it is.
It’s eight months since we learned two architects from Melbourne were visiting Lyndoch Living despite the “ring of steel” Covid-19 lockdown in that city.
Lyndoch denied they were even from Melbourne.
It’s 18 months since we learned that the community was no longer welcome to become members of Lyndoch: every single membership application from the general community has been rejected, including that of our now Mayor Vicki Jellie.
Board member positions are no longer advertised.
The annual general meeting is no longer advertised.
Has there been an outcry from the board at this lack of inclusion? No.
Regardless, we have still unpicked the fact that Lyndoch has recorded a series of deficits these past five years and will borrow money from residential bonds (as the current laws allow it to do), to fund its $100 million masterplan.
We also recently learned, thanks to two former Lyndoch workers who peeled back the lid, that Lyndoch was gobbling up to 44 per cent in management fees for home care packages.(Again, the laws currently allow these fees.)
And this still doesn’t touch on what I haven’t been able to publish, because Lyndoch is litigious and I have to pick my way through a minefield to report even this much.
Our local political leaders know about most – if not all – of the above. Some of them have even met personally with those directly affected.
And yet, perhaps despite the best of intentions, nothing has come of it.
That may change after this week.
This week will see the public release of the findings of the Royal Commission into Aged Care and the federal government’s initial responses.
The sad and infuriating story of what people are expected to “put up with” – as aged care residents, aged care staff, the residents families and the wider community – will be laid bare.
It will no doubt emphasise the need for better staffing ratios, better pay, better training and working conditions, better scrutiny of those in positions of responsibility, greater transparency around funding and fees, and why aged care residents should never been seen as “customers”.
But I also hope this inquiry exposes why so many people connected to aged care feel disempowered from speaking up and out about what they know, because they fear the repercussions.
I can tell you that fear and silence around Lyndoch Living is very real, even if not everyone is touched by it.
I know it, several GPs around Warrnambool know it, several lawyers around Warrnambool know it. Our local MPs know it. The families and friends of those directly affected know it.
The release of the Royal Commission findings is our chance as a whole community to speak up for those who can’t do so themselves.
This was the promise the community made to Lyndoch when it was first built more than 60 years ago: first and foremost it would protect and care for the elderly and frail, and those who look after them.
Now is the time to make good on that promise.
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Carol Altmann – The Terrier
Will it be a new face, or an old face? The Warrnambool City Council recruitment of a new CEO has officially begun.
The job advert has gone out, just four days before a Supreme Court hearing which will decide whether the former CEO, Peter Schneider, could get his old job back.
The advert was posted online yesterday by top local government recruitment firm, McArthur, with applications closing on 15 February.
On Monday, however, the judicial review into Mr Schneider’s sacking begins and will sort out one way or the other whether he was denied natural justice when he was dumped by the former council in July last year.
If the judge rules in Mr Schneider ‘s favour, then the new council will have to decide whether they will rehire him.
No witnesses will be called for Monday’s hearing, with a judge instead deciding the case on the written evidence and affidavits put before them.
We can only hope the judgment is made quickly, for the sake of Mr Schneider, the new councillors who inherited this mess, and the good people of Warrnambool, all of whom have been sitting in the equivalent of a Jetstar flight circling over and over the airport, unable to land because of turbulence.
I asked the council spokesman and Mayor Vicki Jellie today how the council could start advertising for a new CEO, when the former CEO is still yet to learn his fate?
The response was that, under the Local Government Act, the WCC is legally bound to get things moving and must “…make a permanent appointment to the position of Chief Executive Officer as soon as practicable after a vacancy in the position occurs”.
“Given the then impending elections, and the intervening caretaker period, an earlier appointment was not a feasible option,” the statement said.
But, the statement added, ” the appointment of a CEO is a priority for the new councillors”.
I bet it is.
The whole process from here will be overseen by the council’s CEO Employment Matters Committee, which will also have all new faces at the table, including Mayor Jellie, two councillors and an independent chair.
This chair is being recruited as we speak and will be in place after the 1 March council meeting.
Monday also marks the first council meeting for 2021 and, I feel, when the real work begins for this new council.
They have a lot to clean up: appointing a chief who can finally land that plane, get us all through customs, and get Warrnambool out into the fresh air is the first of them.
Only then can our city move on.
Exclusive
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
I am technically taking a break, but some stories can’t wait until the new year, and this is one of them – a confirmed outbreak of scabies in the Audrey Prider Centre at Lyndoch Living.
What a Christmas gift to residents in APC, which is a high-care dementia wing and home to some of the most vulnerable people in Lyndoch aged care.
The scabies diagnosis confirms what Lyndoch nursing staff and some residents’ families have long suspected, with a nasty rash coming and going through APC for months and months.
Lyndoch management finally brought in skin specialist Dr Werner Sinclair on 5 December and he has since issued a formal diagnosis of scabies for at least two residents.
I understand that up to eight residents are now potentially affected by what is a highly contagious infestation.
But this diagnosis by Dr Sinclair didn’t just happen.
It followed an intervention by the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation on behalf of nursing staff who were sick to death of being fobbed off.
As reported by The Terrier, the union wrote a letter to Lyndoch on 27 November demanding answers on whether there had been any suspected or confirmed cases of scabies in APC in the past six months and, if so, what had been done about it.
Some of its members, the union wrote, had been “actively treated” for suspected scabies, as had some residents, but nursing staff were “of the view” that they were not to talk about it with residents’ families, or each other.
The ANMF was also told by its members that “minimal infection control measures” had been put in place.
If what the union says is correct, this is pure damage control, if not a cover up.
One thing is certain, and that is that it took the union to put a rocket up the backside of Lyndoch about this outbreak and to bring in the experts.
This begs the bigger and more important question of why?
Why must it take the intervention of a union to see the immediate welfare of residents and staff in Audrey Prider Centre shoot to the very top of Lyndoch’s priorities?
And if the union had not intervened, would the outbreak have ever been formally diagnosed and responded to? Or would the itch just go on?
The families of some of those infected are absolutely furious by what has unfolded.
Their stories are ones of confusion and misinformation.
One woman said she learned of her mother’s scabies via a phone call from Lyndoch last Monday – December 14 – by which time her family had been to visit her mother several times and been potentially exposed.
In another case, a family member of an APC resident who is being treated for scabies, has scabies.
While scabies is not deadly, it causes an intense, almost maddening itch from tiny, burrowing mites that get under the victim’s skin.
Treatment is via either oral medication or an external lotion applied all over the body.
According to a document sent to me, Lyndoch is using the services of an infection control consultant – Victorian Infection Prevention Services – to help manage its outbreak.
Bulk supplies of one lotion, Benzemul, have been brought it to protect APC nursing staff, who were urged to start applying the lotion to themselves as of last Monday, 14 December.
It’s understood residents are also being treated with a lotion.
To contain the outbreak, APC staff must also wear long sleeves and gloves when dealing with infected residents, wash their hands after every resident contact, and dispose of all used linen immediately into a laundry skip rather than carrying it.
Scabies, to put it bluntly, is a bastard of a thing to catch, and to contain.
And all of this comes to light as the Lyndoch Living executive gathers tonight for its Christmas break up. I hope they are having a good time, because those with the scabies are certainly not.
I emailed the Lyndoch CEO Doreen Power, chair Susan Cassidy, and the Lyndoch media unit at 11am this morning for comment. I will update this piece if any comment is provided.
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
As the count goes on to decide who will sit alongside frontrunner Vicki Jellie on the new Warrnambool City Council, we must remember that there is important, unfinished business from the last go round.
The first is whether the WCC has referred a crime to the police – the abuse and misuse of a council corporate credit card.
It is now almost four weeks since the Ombudsman recommended it consider doing so: we still don’t know if it has.
The latest statement from Acting CEO Vikki King is “at this stage there is no update in relation to the referral of the credit card findings to the Warrnambool Police”.
A former senior council manager lied and covered up his spending on a council credit card and yet, four weeks on from this confirmation, the council is apparently no further forward on pursuing any criminal charges.
For a council that allegedly couldn’t wait to throw a CEO out the door for pressing pause on a fishing pontoon, this is disturbing.
And for our local paper to argue that the stolen money was “paid back”…if only such justice was served to the poor bastards thrown into court for pinching a packet of chops.
Just as disturbing is the second item of unfinished business: the leaking of highly sensitive, highly personal documents from within council to at least two councillors, in the mail.
Three sworn affidavits from Tony Herbert, Sue Cassidy and Kylie Gaston all revealed that psychometric test results for those who applied for the position of CEO were leaked.
Senior council staff have known about this leak since at least April this year, when Robert Anderson asked for an investigation.
Has it been investigated? Did it turn the joint upside down? Did it run a full IT audit to see who had access to these highly personal documents? (I would guess, not many people.)
Has it contacted the Inspectorate or the anti-corruption body IBAC?
We don’t know, because the Acting CEO – as of today – has declined to comment.
“It would be inappropriate to comment on matters currently before the Supreme Court,” is the statement.
But this leak is not being challenged in the Supreme Court. It happened. And nothing, it seems, has been done to track down the person/s responsible.
As it happens, IBAC just today issued a newsletter on this very topic of misuse of private and personal information held by councils.
IBAC warns that such misuse “may constitute corrupt conduct”.
There is that c word again.
I am as invigorated as you are by the wave of change that is poised to roll through our council and the above just underscores – yet again – why such a change can’t come soon enough.
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
Former Warrnambool City Council CEO Peter Schneider failed to perform in his job almost from day one, according to sworn evidence by former councillor Kylie Gaston.
Ms Gaston submitted a 10-page affidavit to the Supreme Court late Monday, setting out her defence as to why she was one of four councillors who voted to sack Mr Schneider on 13 July – 18 months after he replaced CEO Bruce Anson.
(The affidavit was released by the Supreme Court today, after the Melbourne Cup holiday).
Ms Gaston was the last of the four councillors to lodge an affidavit, but the evidence reiterates and reflects many of the justifications made by former councillors David Owen, Sue Cassidy and Michael Neoh, which have already been reported here. Acting CEO Vikki King was the fifth affidavit.
In particular, Ms Gaston refers to Mr Schneider intervening with the now infamous Queens Rd fishing pontoon that was built opposite the then-home of former Cr Peter Hulin, and the results of the council staff survey that showed poor staff morale and concerns of bullying.
Ms Gaston claims councillors also raised concerns with Mr Schneider “multiple times” about key staff not being replaced, governance issues and about staff well-being, but “he did not respond to many of our requests”.
Ms Gaston also raises fresh allegations, including that former CEO was under performing virtually from day one and, a month after he started, both she and the former Mayor were checking the fine print of his contract.
“In March 2019…I had a meeting with the Mayor for a general catch up. I asked him how Mr Schneider was going and he told me he was worried that Mr Schneider might be out of his depth.
“Together, we decided to check if Mr Schneider had a probationary clause in his employment contract, as the Mayor did not recall.
“We did not find a probationary clause and just left it at that, figuring that Mr Schneider would start to improve with time”.
But, according to Ms Gaston’s evidence, the CEO did not improve and in early February 2020 – 12 months after he began – she asked for a copy of his employment contract, which Mr Schneider provided.
All councillors (except Cr Hulin, who had by then resigned) then attended a meeting with Mr Schneider on 21 February to raise their concerns.
“During Mr Schneider’s time as the CEO, he was never proactive in requesting feedback, whether from the councillors at meetings, or with me personally. He did not seek feedback even after the meeting on 21 February,” the statement says.
Ms Gaston also alleges Mr Schneider held up progress on the new joint WCC/TAFE library project by several months, by failing to follow up and confirm philanthropic funding.
This was later done by TAFE CEO Mark Fidge.
Ms Gaston also reveals that she received a leaked copy of Mr Schneider’s psychometric test in the mail, which she showed Mr Herbert.
“When the Mayor saw the results of the psychometric tests, he put his head in his hands and said words to the effect of “Oh God, now this all makes sense,” the statement says.
Ms Gaston then goes on to say that Community Services Manager Vikki King was appointed Acting CEO after Mr Schneider’s sacking because she had already proven herself in the Acting CEO position (Ms King was acting CEO between Mr Anson and Mr Schneider).
Ms King was also the only one of the four directors available, as Scott Cavanagh had resigned, and Peter Utri and Andrew Paton were “conflicted” by the Ombudsman’s investigation, the statement says.
Ms Gaston denied allegations by Mr Schneider and Mr Herbert that she had a close relationship with Ms King and had not socialised with any council staff outside of council events.
The civil case launched by Mr Schneider arguing a lack of natural justice is due to go before the Supreme Court on 1 February.
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