This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Australian nursing homes have admitted up to 112,000 incidents of substandard care including more than half relating to the over-medication of dementia patients.

The figures were revealed during an aged care royal commission hearing in Sydney on Monday. The issue of dementia is on the agenda for hearings over the next fortnight.

Darryl Melchhart, 90, told the hearing she often feared for her life in her Melbourne nursing home because some dementia patients could be “quite vicious”.

“[One woman] came up and tried to take my walker away, I hung on to it naturally and she starts hammering on my hands like mad. I couldn’t hang on any longer, I had to let go,” Melchhart said.

Another woman barged into her room and started rifling through her jewellery box.

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“I put it back and told her to leave the room and she saw a cup … so she tried to throw the contents at me, but there was nothing in the cup so she tried to hammer me with the cup. I mean, it’s laughable now but at the time I was a bit apprehensive,” she said.

Melchhart believed dementia patients should be in a separate area.

She lamented the attitude of some nursing home staff who ignored her pleas for her heart medication and rationed her continence pads.

“I am treated by some of the staff as if I am a child or have dementia,” Melchhart said.

George Akl told the hearing how his late Egyptian-born father’s English language skills declined as he aged and became sicker. His broken English had been mistaken for dementia.

“When he spoke English it felt like he was struggling but when he spoke [Arabic] he was quite coherent,” Akl said.

An Arabic-speaking nurse working there on a short-term contract was able to uncover the discrepancy.

Akl pointed out the lack of translation services available to elderly migrants in nursing homes.

“There’s a big difference between people whose English is a second language and native speaking people that once they get into the … aged care system – there’s a divide in communication,” he said.

“That was really frustrating for him to have to be in a world where he couldn’t be himself and he wasn’t ready to give that up. He still had the ability to communicate. There just wasn’t a space for him to communicate properly.”

Eresha Dassanayake recounted how a nursing home had pressured her to convince her Sri Lankan-born 87-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer’s, not to wear her sari anymore, because it was a trip hazard.

“I forced that on her and I remember her crying and saying ‘why are you doing this to me’,” Dassanayake said.

Fortunately a second nursing home encouraged her mother to continue her cultural practices including wearing traditional clothes.

Merle Mitchell, 84, told the hearing on Monday she lost her sense of independence since moving to a Melbourne nursing home.

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“I haven’t got my own things around me. I can no longer reach out and grab an atlas if I hear something on the news,” she said. “There’s just that feeling that this isn’t a proper life.”

She arranged external counselling to help with the transition.

“Suddenly I’m in an institution, I have to follow what the institution wants, the time to get up, the time to have meals and there’s no choice,” Mitchell said. “You lose your choice totally when you come into aged care.”

While Mitchell credits support from her family and friends to help her retain her cognitive abilities, she says staff simply don’t have the time or in some cases the inclination to help keep residents mentally stimulated.

“Some staff members are absolutely superb. They observe what needs to happen. I reckon there’s about a third of them like that,” she said.

“There are a third of them that are here because of the pressure of Centrelink or because they can’t get jobs in their own field … and there are about a third of them who are absolutely bored to tears and I can tell that because they stand there at meal times yawning.”

The hearing continues on Tuesday.