Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Why would Lyndoch Living, as an aged care home, decide to build, run and maintain a multi-million-dollar medical clinic, using money from….where?

It seems few people other than the Lyndoch board, executive, and perhaps a few consultants knows the answer to these questions, as other than announcing that it’s going to happen, there has been very little transparency around the whole plan.

And what a plan it is.

The official spiel is that the “state-of-the-art healthcare centre” will have a GP practice, pharmacy, radiology and other medical services (a neurologist was apparently mentioned at one point, which would be a first for Warrnambool), plus a cafe, and an underground carpark for 120 vehicles.

What on earth has this got to do with looking after the old and frail?

The only benefit to them that I can see is a shorter distance to visit the doctor by appointment, assuming their GP is one of those contracted to the clinic.

It will also cost a mozza.

No specific cost has been given, but it’s somewhere between $10 million and $50 million, according to a planning permit lodged with the Warrnambool City Council back in February 2017 and approved the following October.

There are a stack of unanswered questions about this whole proposal and the first is, where is the money coming from?

The second is, is Lyndoch leaving itself exposed financially?

Lyndoch refuses to say. (My questions to chair Kerry Nelson and CEO Doreen Power have gone unanswered).

A question about the funding was put in writing to the AGM on 29 October and, after numerous follow ups, answered two weeks later with this response:

“The costs of the Masterplan will be met by a combination of finance options“.

That’s the extent of the reply from Lyndoch.

What an insult.

I honestly think LyndochLand™ , apologies, I mean Lyndoch Living Inc, has forgotten its roots.

We – the community – built, nurtured and have supported Lyndoch for more than 60 years, yet we are no longer encouraged to ask questions.

In this climate we have to guess where the money is coming from, and my guess is Lyndoch will be taking on debt as part of its “combination of finance options”.

Where is the business plan to justify this decision?

And what security is being offered by Lyndoch against any bank loan taken out for the project?

The over-arching question we should be asking is whether Lyndoch – our beloved Lyndoch – is at risk of creating a financial millstone.

A medical complex seems a million miles from Lyndoch’s core business and that’s because it was a million miles, until the Lyndoch board changed its constitution last year to include a medical centre as a key purpose. Why?

Warrnambool has plenty of medical clinics – I can count at least nine – including the two bought by Lyndoch these past 12 months for an undisclosed price: the Warrnambool Medical Clinic and the Health Spot.

A new medical clinic recently opened in King St, and another is planned for the old Caltex service station site on the highway near Foster St.

Building and fitting out a supercalifragilistic clinic at Lyndoch is also just the first, very expensive step.

Lyndoch also has to make it financially sustainable.

Lyndoch will own the clinic, via a new company it set up last year called Lyndoch HealthCare Pty Ltd, and it will contract doctors and hire out spaces to allied health workers, a cafe manager and the like.

But already, even before the clinic is built, it hasn’t all been plain sailing.

Two experienced GPs, who were working with the Warrnambool Medical Clinic, resigned virtually on the spot after a dinner with Lyndoch representatives in April, for reasons which I can’t go into here.

A third GP also considered going elsewhere.

An experienced nurse, who was employed part-time by the WMC and Lyndoch, also found herself out of a job after being told that, as a result of Lyndoch taking over, she had a “conflict of interest” by holding both positions. Update: five nurses have since resigned from WMC, including two in the past week. 

Running medical centres is not easy and just the accreditation process can be arduous.

Yet financing this new medical centre, building it, maintaining it, and sustaining it, will fall on the shoulders of Lyndoch Living that, until this year, was focussed entirely on caring for the old and frail.

I don’t want to sound like a hypochondriac, but all of this makes me have a case of the nerves.

Others are concerned too, because Lyndoch Living is a registered charity and a Public Benevolent Institution.

It was granted this charitable status to care for the aged and infirm, and running a public medical clinic seems at odds with this core aim.

Perhaps not surprisingly, complaints have been made right to the top, and that’s where this story goes next.

More soon.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

The chair of Lyndoch Living, Kerry Nelson, has issued a statement to staff to try and allay any concerns surrounding Lyndoch management.

You can read the statement in full below, or download it here:

Ms Nelson is yet to respond to any of my questions.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

The time has come to use our voices, stand up for Lyndoch and show that Warrnambool will not tolerate bullies, no matter who they are, where they come from, or what they promise.

I have now had contact with 33 people, including past and present Lyndoch workers, about the toxic culture and the warped priorities that have allegedly taken root within its walls. By the end of this weekend, I will have spoken to 36.

We can’t turn away and expect the victims of this culture to fix it; they can’t.

Instead we, as a community of terriers, need to get involved, to step up and hold the Lyndoch board to account for what is unfolding on its watch.

We did this with the Warrnambool City Council credit card scandal and we can do it again.

Some of Lyndoch’s most senior and experienced staff are among the 70 to 80 people who have left in the past two years and the resignations just keep coming, yet the board remains silent.

If this was happening in a primary school, or our hospital, or inside TAFE, it would be front page news.

So would some of the decisions around the use of public funds.

As it stands, Lyndoch Living – as a registered charity – has spent more than $100,000 on gambling via sponsoring a steeplechase and hosting a corporate marquee at the May races, and somehow this passes as core business.

We also know that Lyndoch plans to spend millions of dollars to build and run a new medical centre that nobody has asked for, while at the same time it doesn’t have enough experienced nurses to fill shifts, and basic furniture needs replacing.

Enough.

I am unable to look on while personal power trips are pursued at the expense of Lyndoch staff wellbeing and, ultimately, the care of our elderly.

So this is what we can do:

– contact the board: chair Kerry Nelson (knelson@mpower.org.au) or any of the other board members: Andrew Paton, Cr Sue Cassidy, Ron Page, Percy Eccles, Kane Grant, Peter Downs, Suzanne Coulson and Lorraine Mielnik via a letter to Lyndoch Living, 10 Hopkins Rd, Warrnambool.

– ask the board about staff morale, staff resignations and Lyndoch’s core priorities;

– contact our local MP Roma Britnell (roma.britnell@parliament.vic.gov.au) and ask her to investigate, just as her Liberal colleague Cindy McLeish did in response to the troubles at Seymour Health;

– write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper which, unfortunately, no longer does investigative journalism;

– most importantly, become a member of Lyndoch: it’s free to apply, can be done by filling out a simple form, and means you can have a say on where Lyndoch is heading and who is in charge.

 

At the moment, Lyndoch has very few members, including the nine people on the board, two life members (Ron Patterson, David Atkinson), the CEO Doreen Power, and four senior staff.

It’s a tight little shop.

Under the new rules of Lyndoch (last year it changed from an association to a company limited by guarantee), these members have significant powers, including standing for the board, voting for the board, and being involved in the AGM.

In fact, unless you are a member, Lyndoch has no obligation to even tell you when the AGM will be held.

This is what happened last October when, for the first time, the Lyndoch AGM was not advertised, nor were the board vacancies.

But here’s the rub: the board gets to decide who can become a member of Lyndoch, so even if you apply, you may not be accepted.

It’s open to all sorts of manipulation and perhaps explains why the current board is such a curious mix.

There are no GPs on the board. There is no lawyer.

But there is the former CEO of the Warrnambool Racing Club, Mr Downs, who now lives in Melbourne and works for Moonee Valley: if that’s not a massive conflict of interest between the board and Lyndoch’s support for racing, Barry the Bullshite Detector and I will run three times around the racecourse.

(Actually, Barry, we will need to do four laps, because Ms Power and Mr Downs also have shares in a racehorse.)

The Lyndoch company secretary – a former PA to Ms Power – also has no accounting or legal qualifications, despite now monitoring a multi-million-dollar organisation.

From all the evidence, none of these people in charge are asking the hard questions about Lyndoch’s operations, or none are asking them publicly.

Cr Cassidy, for example, has gone from being a power house to a mouse. The bold woman who stood up and exposed the games behind the council mayoral race has nothing to say about Lyndoch. She won’t return my calls.

Chair Kerry Nelson? Not a word.

They are supposed to be our eyes and ears, yet all we have is silence.

To me, the entire Lyndoch board and senior executive are accountable for the distress of every single Lyndoch person who is suffering or has suffered.

So I am going to keep exposing what I know, and I am going to also apply to become a member of Lyndoch, although I doubt I will be accepted, even though my mother was in Lyndoch for 10 years, and my late Dad, as a bricklayer, helped build some of it.

Warrnambool people started Lyndoch, we still own it, and we all have a stake in caring for its residents, its staff and its future.

What started as an important story for me is now a campaign – unashamedly – to restore a bold community voice inside Lyndoch and to stand up for those who need us to be strong.

On we go.

You can find the Lyndoch membership form here and its new constitution here.

Next: digging into the multi-million-dollar medical clinic.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Tonight I am digging into the second chapter of where Lyndoch Living CEO Doreen Power worked before being chosen in late 2014 to lead our much-loved aged care home.

To me, Ms Power’s back story is important in the context of what is happening at Lyndoch now:

an extraordinary number of staff that have left since 2015, including a string of senior managers and managers,

allegations of a toxic work environment and;

evidence of staff shortages and equipment shortages for our aged and frail.

As I wrote on Monday, Ms Power was in charge of Seymour hospital for five years from 2007 to 2012, before resigning in the face of a virtual uprising within the town over allegations of a toxic workplace, high staff turnover and extremely low staff morale.

Seymour is almost a mirror image of the concerns now leaking out of Lyndoch.

The back story, however, doesn’t end there.

After Seymour, Ms Power became CEO of Plenty Valley Community Health, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, but resigned and was replaced by an interim CEO after only 18 months.

Why?

After Plenty Valley, Ms Power was appointed Director of Nursing and Manager of the Clinical Team at the Tweddle Child and Family Health Service – her last position before coming to Warrnambool – but, again, she resigned after a few months.

Why?

I have dug deep into these questions and spoken to many people about this period in Ms Power’s career, and a troubling pattern has emerged.

That pattern centres around a particular management style which results in the same allegations: a toxic workplace, low staff morale, high staff turnover and, in the aftermath, the need for a major overhaul and refocus on the organisation’s people and core purpose.

For various reasons I am, unfortunately, unable to quote any sources directly for this piece, but I can tell you that up to 60 staff left Plenty Valley Community Health during 2012-2013.

I can also tell you that the issues left behind for the health centre to deal with were complex and draining.

Former Plenty Valley health board director Marcia O’Neill sums it up in her opening line from the 2013-14 annual report, written six months after Ms Power’s resignation:

“The past year was one of the most challenging in the history of Plenty Valley Community Health.

“Thanks to the efforts of the Board, our stakeholders and key executive staff during this critical time, the prospects for the future are now very promising,” she writes.

Ms O’Neill goes on to say that the appointment of a new CEO (Phillip Bain) saw a sound foundation of executive management and loyal staff and a move back to “business as usual”.

Phillip Bain also gave a blunt assessment in the 2014-15 annual report of what Plenty Valley health looked like when he took charge:

“The Plenty Valley that I joined in early August was a much less confident organisation than the one we see today.

“We had a backlog of productivity, infrastructure and policy issues to address.

“We also had very low levels of staff morale arising from changes in senior management, and had missed out on many opportunities for growth or building partnerships in the years prior.”

One source told me that when Mr Bain took over, it was like Plenty was “being liberated”.

Mr Bain goes on to list 25 main areas of change under his watch, including a new strategic plan, a review of financial reporting, and a “dramatic improvement” in staff morale, absenteeism and staff retention.

Did the Lyndoch board, as it was in 2014 when Ms Power was appointed, know about any of this?

If it did, what impact, if any, did it have on the board’s choice of Ms Power as the best person to guide Lyndoch into the future?

Apparently Ms Power was chosen from 20 applicants, but I am not sure who was on the selection panel. (I emailed chair Kerry Nelson about all this today, but she is on leave until 19 December.)

Lyndoch Living is a very different place under Ms Power’s reign and there is no doubt some changes to Lyndoch were necessary, but what has also happened is a growing culture of silence, with staff too scared to speak up and the public not encouraged to ask questions.

On the ground, the Lyndoch staff have been threatened with disciplinary action if they make any comments on social media that are considered unacceptable by management, and especially if they comment on The Terrier.

I have heard a list of names has been taken, which explains the lack of comments from Lyndoch staff on anything I write (don’t worry, I see you).

The lack of information at the last Lyndoch AGM also showed the disregard for wider community input into Lyndoch’s direction.

I am starting to wonder if Lyndoch, which was started by the community, supported by the community and is still accountable to the community, is turning into Leningrad.

How this has happened, and what we can do about it, is where this story goes next.

More soon.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

If we need a canary in the coal mine about what is unfolding at Lyndoch Living, it’s what happened at the Seymour hospital earlier this decade.

Seymour hospital was plagued with problems in the early 2000s, with a string of doctors resigning, a loss of birthing services, a dysfunctional board, and four official inquiries into the mess in less than two years.

Into this crisis came Doreen Power, who was appointed CEO of Seymour Health in 2007 and left in 2012, during which time the hospital saw many changes and the small town of 7000 people virtually imploded.

Ms Power, who is now CEO of Lyndoch Living, was hired by the Seymour hospital to get things done and she did: birthing services were resumed, the doctors came back to work, and the hard-working staff at the hospital continued to provide the best services that they could.

But behind the scenes of all this “success” was a human train wreck of broken, dis-spirited people, many of whom were allegedly treated so appallingly that they are only just starting to recover and some say they never will.

I have spoken to many people from Seymour about this period and the same stories are repeated over and over:

staff being bullied, losing their jobs for no reason, being “marched off the premises” without warning, hounded over minor issues, feeling disempowered, afraid, depressed and having “nowhere to turn” because the board either wouldn’t listen, or wasn’t told.

This sounds frightening familiar to what is now allegedly unfolding at Lyndoch Living.

“People became severely depressed and traumatised and felt there was nobody who could help them,” said one Seymour woman who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“There was a sense the board had been hand-picked and they wouldn’t help. You were told if you approached the board, you would be dismissed…if you wanted to keep your job, you had to shut up.”

In desperation, some staff organised a Seymour version of an underground resistance by wearing green ribbons to work as a sign that they were a “safe” person to approach if you were being bullied.

Can you imagine?

The terrible reality for these Seymour staff is nobody from the hospital board stepped up, staff were too scared to speak up, and the damage rolled on until the wider community was alerted to what was happening.

An anonymous letter drop was circulated throughout Seymour in early 2012 and local state MP Cindy McLeish, now deputy Opposition leader, was bombarded by people pleading for her to intervene.

Ms Power resigned as CEO in May 2012, just two months before Ms McLeish organised a public meeting that was held in the local footy clubrooms before a capacity crowd of more than 300 people. Nobody from the hospital executive showed up.

Neither Ms Power or the executive, however, escaped the wrath of the crowd.

“The meeting saw pent-up community frustration released about perceived high staff turnover at the hospital, allegations of bullying, a “toxic” workplace, former chief executive Doreen Power and the change from a community hospital to a ‘bean counter mentality’ among other things,” the Seymour Telegraph reported.

Seymour GP Dr Elliot Jarman was among the passionate speakers in the audience. He was quoted by the paper as saying:

“Over 25 years Seymour Hospital has evolved to provide first-class services. I’m proud of that. What I am not proud of is staff absolutely in tears, intimidated…what’s happening is (wrong).

“I’ve been to the courts, I’ve been to Worksafe…(they’re) unable to help. I’ve been seeing patients and my fellow colleagues in tears. It’s just not right. Our services are being damaged by the current management style.”

Another Seymour GP, Dr Rob Peterson, told the meeting that three core issues needed to be addressed immediately: improved communications from the board to staff, allegations of bullying, and low staff morale. Bang, bang, bang.

By the time of the town meeting, it’s understood up to 50 staff had left the hospital, either from being pressured or being fired, and a string of Fair Work claims that followed – I believe up to 14 or 15 –  have only recently been finalised.

“It broke this town and I don’t think it has ever fully recovered,” said one Seymour source.

Seymour ultimately had an intervention, with a ministerial appointment made to the hospital board to report back to then Health Minister David Davis.

By the end of 2012, the hospital chair had resigned and most of the executive team had been cleaned out after their positions became untenable.

As a local blogger, Seymour Dreaming, wrote: “why has the board been conspicuously silent when the community expressed concerns over controversial events for which is was ultimately responsible?”

Why indeed?

And then this, a heart-felt letter to the paper from resident, Janet McKenzie, which says it all:

“The (hospital) board…and past and present executive staff need to be accountable for the shame, hurt, stress and humiliation that has been placed on these staff and their families.

They deserve so much better treatment, as do volunteers who have so generously given their time…

These staff and volunteers must receive an unconditional apology and compensation/reinstatement for the treatment they have received at the hands of (the hospital).

It is not acceptable that is ignored as these are staff and volunteers who have given many years of unblemished, caring and passionate service..

Finally, I, like many other family members of the above staff will be there to give support, assistance and much needed emotional care to those that the (hospital) has abandoned.”

The canary is coughing at Lyndoch Living and I hope the board is listening, because this management style hasn’t happened just once before, but twice.

Next: Plenty Valley.

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