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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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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