Carol Altmann – The Terrier

On Monday afternoon just gone, the hostel area of Lyndoch Living was allegedly operating with only one staff member to cover two wings, and another to cover one wing.

That is two people for around 41 residents, spread across three wings, from 2pm to 10pm.

These staff, according to my sources, were personal care workers.

There was, I am told, no Registered Nurse or Enrolled Nurse on duty for the afternoon shift because there was nobody available.

There was also nobody on duty in one wing of the hostel to serve dinner later in the day.

Residents in that wing were told that if they wanted dinner, they needed to go to another wing in the hostel which involved walking a considerable distance and down a ramp.

As a result, some residents did not have dinner.

In light of these allegations, I emailed Lyndoch Living for comment yesterday before writing this post tonight and asked this specific question:

“Are you able to comment on these allegations and, if correct, what is the cause of the staff shortages in the hostel area and what is being done to address them as Lyndoch moves toward reaccreditation in August?”

There was no reply.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Lyndoch Living spent $1.2 million on consultants and lawyers in 2020, and at least another $3 million on its ever-expanding administration.

A deeper dive into the 2020 financial figures reported to the Australian Charities and Not for Profit Commission show Lyndoch has spent at least $1 million a year for the past three years – a total of $3.34 million – on legal fees, consultancies and auditors.

That $3.34 million over three years is more than the food budget for the 200 to 240 residents, but more on that shortly.

Behind the scenes at Lyndoch, a steady stream of consultants has been working on the $100 million masterplan, including – as I understand it – around $99,999 and 99 cents paid to one consultant for the business plan for the medical clinic that will be built on site later this year.

We haven’t seen that business plan, but we can only trust that it’s a good one, because Lyndoch is going into the uncharted waters of borrowing big to finance the estimated $23 million cost.

At the same time, Lyndoch’s administration costs are now more than $3 million a year, compared to $2.5 million in 2015.

The admin budget is hard to follow from year to year, because it keeps bouncing around the balance sheet like a bee in a bottle.

In 2018, it was $3.3m.

In 2019, it suddenly fell to $1.94m after an adjustment or “restatement”.

In 2020, it was back up to $3.07m.

While the figures are subject to the vagaries of various accounting methods, one thing we do know is that the number of admin staff at Lyndoch has gone up.

As has already been reported here, admin staff at Lyndoch shot up from 37 in 2016 to around 60 in 2018, and several other, highly paid souls have joined since.

(Since 2018, Lyndoch no longer publishes a staff breakdown of how many people work in each area.)

In addition to these costs, just under another $1 million has been spent in the past three years on advertising and marketing, including Lyndoch’s sponsorship of the grand annual jumps race at the Warrnambool May Races.

This sponsorship, which was renewed in 2019 and now runs until 2022, was designed to promote its Waterfront Living apartments.

I am yet to hear of anyone buying one of the apartments because they were at the races, but perhaps in between punts they were persuaded.

As it happens, the last of the apartments were sold at heavily discounted prices late last year so Waterfront could finally reach full occupancy.

But enough of the fascinators and corporate suits, what of the budget for residential care?

This brings us back to the kitchen.

I always like to check how much is being spent on food, given this – unlike the races – really is the core business of an aged care home.

In 2019, Lyndoch spent $1.2m on food for around 200 residents, or about $16.50 per resident, per day.

In 2020, this had risen to $1.44m, which looks good on paper, but Lyndoch has also since bought the May Noonan Hostel in Terang, so the number of residents has also increased to around 240.

This means the food budget works out to be the same – around $16.50 per resident, per day.

That is around $6000 in food per resident, per year.

(I suspect the various legal battles funded by Lyndoch against The Terrier have cost the equivalent of that per month.)

Again, I provide this information so the community, which owns Lyndoch, can keep an eye on its direction and priorities behind the marketing and public relations. If you wander over to the Australian Charities and Not for Profit Commission, you can check it all out for yourself.

In the meantime, we keep digging.

More soon.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

As the year comes to a close, I wish I could do more for those who contact me about Lyndoch Living.

Whenever I write about Lyndoch aged care, I get a stream of messages from readers, most of whom thank me for just listening, even if I can’t help.

People care about Lyndoch and its residents, including the staff who have to go to extraordinary lengths just to get a message to me, for fear of being “caught” talking to The Terrier, but also the families of residents, and friends of residents.

I find so many of these messages heartbreaking and I feel powerless, because I can’t fix it.

All I can do is tell you – the wider community – what I have learnt and what I have investigated and hope that you, like me, won’t look away.

Like this message from a reader about the new $13 million Swinton Wing extension:

“..residents from (Tomlinson) have now been moved to the second floor of the new “dementia building” (my words). This means that all ambulant dementia residents are now “trapped” upstairs with no free access to an outside area where they can feel the breeze or sun on their face, walk on a “return” path through an enclosed garden area, and see birds hopping around.

“They now have no chickens to care for and secured outside areas for unsupervised activities are now nonexistent. ….. the new building is very impressive and state of the art, but soulless and clinical.

“Whoever thought that this was an improvement to the quality of residents’ lives has no understanding of the ageing and their needs. My alarm bells are going off and I feel this needs further investigation. Please.”

Please.

This is the new Lyndoch, I have learned, where pictures are not allowed on the new walls of the new rooms and the new TV that comes with the new room is the one a resident MUST use, even if they don’t know how to work the freakin’ new remote control.

And then there are the messages about “the rash”.

I have had so many messages about a “rash” that has been coming and going through the Audrey Prider Centre at Lyndoch for six months and I can – at last – write about it because the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF) has taken up the issue on behalf of their members – the nursing staff on the front line.

In a letter to Lyndoch last week, the ANMF has asked the question up front: is this rash scabies? And if it is, what is being done about it, and what has been done to support residents and staff?

The union has asked for a response by tomorrow (Dec 4).

If this rash is not scabies – I have since heard that it ISN’T – then what is it?

It is enough to have staff and family of some residents demanding more answers.

Another worry that has filtered through to The Terrier these past weeks is the mobile “black spots” within Lyndoch that means families calling after-hours to check on sick loved ones are finding the phones are either not answered (because nursing staff are in a black spot) or the call drops out.

All of those millions spent on expanding Lyndoch – and adding an IT specialist to the executive team – and the phone system is unreliable.

Perhaps instead of worrying about awards and nominations and getting its name up in fairy lights, Lyndoch needs to make sure it responds to these concerns – and I am only able to share a few of them here.

Speaking of lights, the big, new, illuminated, illegal corporate logo on Swinton Wing will be approved retrospectively by the WCC, but will not be lit up.

The lighting breaks the planning laws, but it took neighbours to tell them that.

Given the WCC head of planning is on the Lyndoch board, we can only assume that he had no idea this sign was going ahead.

I really hope Lyndoch receives a refund on the LED.

And I really hope that those who have concerns and fears and worries about Lyndoch will keep speaking up and find the strength to stand up, to light up, knowing that we – the community – has their back.

On we go.

[This is my last post for 2020. Thankyou so much to all of the terriers who have helped The Terrier to keep going in more ways than one. You are the voices behind this voice and I couldn’t do any of it without you.]

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Well blow me down if the Cassign team was not back at Lyndoch Living today installing a huge, illuminated sign on the front of the new Swinton Wing.

Just last night, as you know, I wrote about the perceived conflict of interest between Cassign and Lyndoch chair Sue Cassidy, who is married to the owner of Cassign, David Cassidy.

I wonder if Lyndoch put this latest slice of non-essential corporate branding out to tender, because this sign is not a little A-frame at risk of blowing over in the Warrnambool wind – it needed a cherry picker and three guys to install.

We will most likely never know, because Lyndoch no longer tells the community such things.

But what I can confirm is, as flagged last night, the Lyndoch at-home gardening team is being dismissed as of late January because they are costing Lyndoch money.

These are the hard-working men and women who visit people’s homes to mow lawns, whipper snip, and edge garden beds with a skilful eye well beyond my own.

They are now dispensable to Lyndoch, even if they were indispensable to those who used the service.

The home gardening team costs Lyndoch around $100,000 a year, and so they are out.

Be gone ye faithful gardeners, Lyndoch has snazzy signs to install via a cherry picker!

I was thinking we could offer some suggestions as to where Lyndoch could whipper-snip its costs to save the gardeners, and we could start with the number of executives.

As I wrote last night, a brand new executive position has just been filled and, as it turns out, another two will be advertised in January:

– Operations Manager: Organisational Development

– Organisational Development Consultant

Good grief.

An organisational consultant to assist the organisational manager who reports to another manager, who reports to the CEO…

At last count, Lyndoch had around 60 administrative staff.

The good people of Seymour know all about top-heavy administration, which unfolded at their hospital some years ago, and was one of several upsets challenged by the local community that led to a complete upheaval in 2012.

The CEO of Lyndoch was the CEO of Seymour Health at the time.

Lyndoch also sponsors the Grand Annual Steeplechase horse race, which was ostensibly in the hope that such advertising would help sell the waterfront apartments.

It didn’t work.

The last of these apartments was flogged off recently in a fire sale for $100,000 less than the listed price in 2014.

Lyndoch also hosts a corporate marquee for three days at the May Racing Carnival – at a cost of around $40,000 –  and would have done so again this year had it not been for Covid-19.

And yet the gardening staff are being cut.

We see what is happening here. We all see it. And we are not looking away.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Oh, the tangled web. Warrnambool can be a very, very small place when it comes to who knows who, and who ends up where, how, and why.

Which is why I asked Lyndoch Living this week how it manages the potential conflicts of interest around Lyndoch board member and now Lyndoch chair, Sue Cassidy.

I asked this because Ms Cassidy, who joined the Lyndoch board in 2017, is married to David Cassidy who operates Cassign: a very successful signage company that has operated in Warrnambool since 1983.

Cassign has done a lot of signage for Lyndoch Living these past few years, including the Lyndoch bus and the new signage at the Warrnambool Medical Clinic that, last year, was bought by Lyndoch Living for $1.3 million.

Cassign also provided the installation work for the swish flat-screen TV that now sits at the drive-through entrance to Lyndoch Living.

Most recently, as I understand it, Cassign replaced old signage outside the new Swinton Wing with a sparkling new sign that, among other things, directs people to the “Lyndoch Medical Hub”.

I know more than I probably need to know about Cassign, because I have raised the issue of potential conflict of interest before, when Ms Cassidy was a Warrnambool City Councillor and voted on issues to do with racehorse training on our local beaches.

At that time, I questioned how Ms Cassidy could be part of any such discussions when Cassign sponsored horse races in Warrnambool.

In response, Mr Cassidy sent me a series of long and passionate emails setting out why – in essence – my stories were all a crock and there was no potential conflict of interest and his wife was a modern woman who ran her own business, while he ran his.

I saw it differently – and I still do. Which brings me back to Lyndoch Living.

This week I  asked Lyndoch Living (and Ms Cassidy) whether Lyndoch put out a tender for its signage work and, given Cassign has done at least some of this work to date, how it managed any perceived conflicts of interest.

The answer, as always, was no answer.

We shall have to make up our own minds.

In the meantime, you may recall that a couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about Lyndoch looking for yet another senior executive to add to its ballooning executive team which has grown from 37 in 2017 to almost 60 in 2019.

This newly created position – Director of Research, Enterprise and Education – was worth more than $100k a year, was advertised only internally and for only around 10 days, leading me to speculate that someone was already lined up for the job.

That someone, I took a punt, was Julie Bertram, a retired director from South-West TAFE, who this year has been filling a maternity leave position in the Lyndoch executive.

Lo and behold, guess who today was announced as the winning candidate for the job? Ms Bertram.

While Ms Bertram is no doubt perfect for the role, the bigger question is why Lyndoch’s executive team seems to have an ever-increasing number of new staff in roles that, between them, must cost a fortune.

For what purpose and for what return to Lyndoch and its residents?

This latest position comes on the heels of Lyndoch recording a $1.9 million deficit – its fifth deficit in five years.

It also comes amid unconfirmed reports that Lyndoch’s at-home gardening staff will soon be dismissed because they are costing Lyndoch money.

And it comes as we start the countdown to Lyndoch’s full financial figures for 2020 being released in January through the Australian Charities and Not for Profit Commission.

I wonder if the food bill for Lyndoch will have increased from the paltry average of $13 per resident, per day, in 2019?

The silence from Lyndoch is always deafening when it comes to my questions, but rest assured that I will keep asking.

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