Carol Altmann – The Terrier

This is Janet Dunn.

Janet is among the 115 people on the roll call of the rejected – those who have been denied membership to Lyndoch Living aged care.

If ever there was a case study of the absurdity of how the current Lyndoch board decides who becomes a member, it’s Janet, because Janet used to be a member.

In fact Janet worked at Lyndoch for 10 years as the Director of Community Services (1992-2001), during which time she developed and managed nine community programs from five offices across southwest Victoria.

Janet was also in charge of coordinating the initial accreditations for both the Lyndoch Nursing Home and Community Services, before her career took her to Melbourne.

Since leaving Lyndoch, Janet has managed several nursing homes –  both private and not-for-profit – and, unlike Lyndoch in recent months, has never failed any standards.

A quick look at Janet’s Linkedin profile reveals she has managed up to 300 staff, has in-depth knowledge of the aged care accreditation and funding systems, has worked on several state committees, including Ministerial Advisory Committees, and holds several post grad qualifications, including an MBA.

Oh my goodness.

Not only should Janet be a member of Lyndoch, she should be urged to nominate for the Lyndoch board at the AGM on 26 October.

The board, which has two vacancies and only one person with any nursing or aged care experience, needs people like Janet.

But while Janet has 30 years experience in aged care management, she is not able to become even a member of Lyndoch.

Why?

What is the criteria?

Did chair Sue Cassidy (Unisexcuts) and members Andrew Paton (WCC director), Kerry Nelson (former MPower CEO), Ron Page (dairy industry), Lorraine Milenik, Prof Rob Wallis and treasurer Kane Grant (Sinclair & Wilson), decide that because The Terrier was urging people to apply, that anyone who did apply was immediately ruled out?

Was that the criteria?

If so, what a wasted opportunity for Lyndoch to re-open its doors to the community, including to some extraordinary talent, like Janet, Marie Bird and Kate Sloan.

I have never met Janet and I only discovered her background after she commented on The Terrier Facebook page, but like the other 114 people, Janet’s application was dismissed without comment.

The board can do this under the Lyndoch Constitution and there is nothing, it seems, us mere mortals can do about it.

But surely it is wrong, so wrong, that a community owned asset can be controlled by a board that has no obligation, or desire, to explain itself.

Given this, I would like to see the whole board put up for re-election on 26 October.

Imagine that: a fresh start.

Lyndoch could then open up itself up to nominations from existing board members AND the general public, just like the “good old days” of three years ago.

It won’t happen, of course.

Why?

Because Lyndoch has shown it’s now fearful of any involvement or examination by the very community it was set up to serve.

How did it come to this?

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Meet Marie Bird, another highly skilled member of our community who has been locked out of joining Lyndoch Living.

Marie is among the 115 people who have been denied the right to become a simple member – not even a board member – of Lyndoch, our community owned aged care home.

Her application, like that of experienced nurse Kate Sloan who I wrote about last week, was rejected by the board without consideration or comment.

Let me tell you a little about Marie, who has lived in Warrnambool for 24 years.

She is a highly successful businesswoman (The Bird Group), a volunteer, philanthropist, a former member of various boards and committees, and currently the human resources director of her business involving the management of more than 500 staff.

On top of this, Marie has had personal experience in building community links with aged care.

In 1985, Marie set up an adult learning program in Port and South Melbourne that included close contact with the SouthPort Aged Care Community Nursing Home.

“The nursing home had an open door policy towards the community, resulting in some amazing opportunities for its residents,” Marie told me.

Through her work as an Outreach Community Education Officer with Prahran TAFE, Marie introduced a program that allowed the nursing home residents – along with people, who for whatever reason, were housebound – to re-engage in learning.

“The strength of this program, which went on for many years after I left my job, came from the local community’s involvement…which included the SouthPort Aged Care Nursing Home,” Marie says.

“This experience has stayed with me for more than 30 years, so to think Lyndoch Living – who until recent times nurtured this model of operation – has now shut itself off from its community just saddens me no end, hence my desire to see Lyndoch remain as a community based facility.”

In a normal world, Lyndoch would welcome Marie – with all of her skills and all of her business nous – as a member.

But no, Lyndoch doesn’t do normal.

Her application, like all the others, was metaphorically dumped straight into the bin.

The board made this decision.

So why would Lyndoch chair Susan Cassidy, hairdresser and owner of Unisexcuts, reject Marie Bird?

Why did deputy chair Kerry Nelson, the former (now retired) CEO of MPower, think Marie was a bad choice?

And treasurer Kane Grant, who works for Sinclair & Wilson? What was his reasoning?

And retired Deakin University academic Prof Rob Wallis?

And former nurse educator Lorraine Milenik? What were her concerns?

And Ron Page, an operations manager with the Australian Dairy Farmers Corp?

And last, but not least, why would Andrew Paton, the Director of City Growth at Warrnambool City Council, reject the application of one of Warrnambool’s leading businesswomen?

There are no explanations; the board can offer only silence.

The Lyndoch AGM will be held on 26 October and nominations to become a board member close two weeks prior.

There are two vacancies on the board and – personally – I would love to see Marie nominate for one of them, but she can’t, because she is not a member, which is a pre-requisite.

In reality, nobody can nominate for the board, other than those ‘tapped on the shoulder’ by the existing board members.

For a community owned aged care home to behave in this way should be unacceptable.

And yet, it seems, those with the real power to challenge it, accept it.

I wonder what it will take for the charade to end?

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

And so it comes to this – the Lyndoch Living board has kicked the community to the kerb with a mass rejection of membership applications.

The official letters began arriving in the post today.

Among those rejected was Kate Sloan, (pictured).

Kate has worked in the emergency department of South West Health Care for 20 years, including 13 years as nurse unit manager.

She has been a registered nurse since 1986 and an endorsed nurse practitioner for 14 years.

Kate also has post-graduate qualifications in emergency nursing, health management and forensic nursing.

She has hospital certifications in critical care and midwifery.

Kate wrote all of this on her Lyndoch membership application form, even though there was no box for such detail, to show the board that she might have something to offer as a member.

But Kate was considered not good enough.

She was not considered worthy of becoming a mere member, let alone ever considering becoming a board member.

The decision to reject Kate was made by Chair Sue Cassidy (hairdresser), Kerry Nelson (former CEO Mpower), Andrew Paton (WCC director City Growth), Ron Page (dairy industry), Kane Grant (Sinclair & Wilson accountant), Lorraine Mielnik (retired  nursing lecturer) and retired academic Prof Rob Wallis*.

No reason has to be given, and the board provided none.

Kate is not alone.

From what is unfolding so far, all 115 applications from the community membership drive last month have been rejected.

The Lyndoch board has – so far – not found one single person from the applicants that they consider worthy of joining Lyndoch.

Not one.

In my view, this board no longer represents the community.

From its actions over the past 12 months and particularly now, it has proven it has disconnected completely from the community that created and nurtured Lyndoch Living for more than 60 years and which still owns it.

That is disgraceful.

Instead of standing up and speaking up, the board is a part of Lyndoch’s determination to avoid community scrutiny.

It is an accomplice – not an ally – as it watches the community lose control of a community owned asset.

Again, in my view, this is disgraceful.

The community is no longer needed or wanted on a rocket ship that has its nose turned toward the ground and is losing senior nursing staff at a time when it needs them most.

Perhaps, as some have been speculating, it’s all a path to Lyndoch being privatised.

I used to think that was outlandish and would never happen. Now, I’m not so sure.

Because, until now, I believed that the community would never LET it happen.

I have come to realise the community has no – official – power to stop it.

The board has complete control over who it lets in, and who it keeps out, and you are being kept out.

And so come the next Annual General Meeting at Lyndoch on 26 October, there will be no invitation for you to join in.

I doubt you will even be told the date, which is why I am publishing it here.

There will be no questions from anyone outside of Lyndoch itself.

Anyone who hopes to nominate for the board, can’t, because you have to be a member first.

The AGM will be an entirely closed shop and, if you are lucky, you might get to watch it on Youtube a week later.

Despite the odds, I am not giving up on Lyndoch without a fight.

Because Lyndoch doesn’t belong to Sue, Andrew Prof Rob, Kane or Kerry. It doesn’t belong to the Lyndoch CEO or executive, and it sure as #$@$ doesn’t – yet – belong to BUPA.

It belongs to Warrnambool.

As a journalist, I can write about this as The Terrier.

But as a member of the community who has a strong connection to Lyndoch, like so many of us do, I will be once again writing to MPs Roma Britnell, Dan Tehan and  Minister Luke Donnellan and asking for their intervention.

The community has done all it can to fight for our aged care home: we need help.

In the meantime, if you have had your application rejected and are willing to be mentioned here, please get in touch.

* The chair and board was contacted earlier today for comment. It had not responded by deadline.

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

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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