Shuffling along too slowly

OPINION: The sooner rest home audits are fully open to public scrutiny, and surprise checks on their performance become the norm, the better, writes The Southland Times in an editorial.

A fresh outrage – if fresh is not an inapt word, given the staleness of the issue of rest home cruelties and abuses – has led to the swift termination of a health board contract with the Rose A Lea home in Palmerston North.

The Manawatu Standard obtained distressing images of a woman tied to her bed. She had bedsores.

A complaint was lodged on Thursday, an audit team hit the ground on Friday and promptly reported problems around infection control, duty of care, health and safety and medication management. The contract has been terminated and the owners are talking to their lawyers.

On a reactive level, the MidCentral District Health Board has acted with acceptable alacrity.

On a pro-active governmental and ministerial level, things have been sluggardly.

The realisation of long-promised public access to reports on the quality of rest homes still lies over the horizon.

Sure, the Health Ministry has set up a website but anyone who does go to moh.govt.nz and clicks on healthcert will find a piddlingly small proportion of the homes listed actually have online reports attached. More summaries will be added "as they become available".

Right there you have the flaccid, passive language of the bureaucrat, who is really saying "when we finally get them done".

Those surprise audits we were reassuringly told about are still at the pilot stage.

A national total of – wait for it – 16 aged-care facilities are down to receive unannounced audits.

Small point: the owners of those homes have volunteered to take part in the pilot and so they wouldn't be completely unprepared.

Fine. What's the hurry really? Like those happy old codgers in the cheese ad would say: good things take time.

And it's surely a good thing to be minimising the cases such as tied-down oldies, or the Belhaven Rest Home dementia patient in July last year whose mouth had been tightly taped shut by an exasperated staffer, or the man in Lower Hutt who suffocated in a wheelchair while wearing a neck brace, or the broken-armed dementia patient in South Auckland who spent almost 40 hours in agony waiting for pain relief, or that nurse who was still ticking a box every half hour to show she was checking on the safety of an elderly woman three days after she had died and her body had been removed.

The Government and the ministry need to be showing conspicuous traction on this issue.

Many homes do provide admirable services but inadequate rest homes, more often through financial grasping rather than overt malice, have been operating under what Age Concern New Zealand called intimidation, indifference, humiliation and neglect.

Gone are the days when residential homes were just accommodation.

People going into care are increasingly old, increasingly frail and increasingly dependent on their facilities being adequately resourced. Five years ago standards were nominally tightened, but the suspicion remained that many a dodgy facility was, with sufficient warning, able to present a deceptively good face.

This has become a national disgrace.

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