Aged-Care CCTV

The Hon. F. PANGALLO (15:40): The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety has failed the very people it was meant to protect: vulnerable elderly people in aged care. While I welcome many of the commission's divided recommendations, I am staggered it ignored the use, or even a trial, of CCTV cameras in the bedrooms of aged-care residents, and I am not alone.

Noleen Hausler, who covertly filmed the horrifying assault of her father, Clarence, in an aged-care facility, is bitterly disappointed. Noleen said in 2015 that a royal commission was not needed. Here is Noleen's response to the commission's findings. I quote:

I said the billions that would be spent on the Commission would be better spent on employing nurses and installing CCTV cameras in residents' bedrooms.

Six years later I stand by my answer.

The recommendations leave the high-end dependency resident with no transparent means to be heard.

Oakden whistleblower and respected aged-care safety advocate, Stewart Johnston, is equally stunned. To quote him:

Independent, professionally-monitored CCTV needs to be part of the conversation.

Quality care and safety is a right for all that require it—lives literally depend on it.

Then there are these comments I received last night in an email from David Kennedy, whose mother died in an aged-care facility earlier this year. Again, I quote:

Around halfway through last year, somebody broke four bones in my Mother's foot which left her bed-bound.

In January this year, she passed away from an unstageable pressure wound. Unstageable because it has surpassed Stage 1, 2, 3 & 4 and turned into a rotting black hole the size of a fifty cent piece exposing her bone. As a result of immobility, no longer eating, muscle wastage and weighing only 43kgs, she died as a result of the wound on 21 January 2021.

I am currently reading one of the very many articles dedicated at the moment to the findings of the Royal Commission into Aged Care and it disturbs me that NOT ONE of the articles or even the findings in the report talk or support the use of CCTV Cameras in Aged Care facilities.

The commission's very foundations were made on the back of disturbing vision, taken from hidden cameras, of aged-care residents being abused and assaulted in their bedrooms by people who thought they were not being watched. As a journalist, I conducted hidden camera investigations that caught out abuse and neglect going back 20 years. This conduct continues unchecked to this very day.

The Oakden scandal was a tragic and disgraceful blight on aged care, but only revealed by whistleblowers. We know residents in aged care continue to be abused and assaulted because of the lack of supervision in these places. One of the strongest tools to reduce these types of assaults as well as improving the general safety of residents and lifting the standard of care is installing CCTV cameras that are monitored independently off site.

Aged-care facilities in other parts of the world that have them are achieving outstanding results, yet in Australia we are still reluctant to go down that road while wanting to throw billions of dollars into the sector. Why? It is because the operators fear them as it will put a spotlight on their facilities and their practices. I introduced a private member's bill into parliament two years ago that would have allowed CCTV cameras to be installed in state government-run facilities.

Shamefully, both parties refused to support the groundbreaking legislation, with the state government instead announcing plans for its own trial of the technology in a small number of its facilities. Even that was bungled and watered down from what was originally planned. Instead of fearing what the cameras will reveal, why do these operators not see it as a powerful tool that offers their residents and their families a sense of increased security and safety while also maintaining privacy?

For $25 per week per room, monitoring is undertaken 24/7 by an independent third party using trained observers, qualified nurses and social workers with full security clearances to monitor and document activities of staff and residents, incidents and performance. They also act as a deterrent and detection of criminal activity, like the theft of personal property or exposing exercise of dominion patterns by persons known to them.

These issues are far more prevalent than people realise. This technology puts personal safety and the wellbeing of vulnerable residents first. Is that not what the royal commission was all about? Yet, blinded by the vast majority of complaints about abuse in the system, the commissioners still did not see it.