From the desk of Roland Rocchiccioli – 24 November

The unedifying spectacle of politicians, and avaricious owners and operators of aged care facilities, wringing their hands like the grieving women of Corinth, and pleading ignorance at the systemic abuse uncovered by the Royal Commission is embarrassing!

TO pretend otherwise is cunningly disingenuous. What has been happening behind closed doors has been known forever; common knowledge within the industry. The television shows Day By Day, Today Tonight, A Current Affair, Four Corners, and This Day Tonight, have aired countless exposes of the shameful state-of-affairs in our old people’s homes, as they were called in less enlightened times.

When I left school I began training as a nurse. I worked on the wards of the Claremont Mental Hospital and the Sunset Old Men’s Home for the Destitute. What today is diagnosed as dementia and Alzheimer’s was classified as senile decay, and invariably resulted in patients being committed, long-term, to a mental institution. Segregated, and abandoned by their families, they were locked-away in the old men’s/women’s wards and left to die. Some went without visitors for the duration of their hospitalisation. They lived-out their days in a ward with its crowded dormitory, a day and dining room with bars on the windows, and a walled exercise yard, built on a slope which allowed them a glimpse of the outside world.

Down Syndrome children – they were labelled Mongoloid in those times – were committed to the mental hospital as youngsters; they were transferred to adult wards at puberty where they stayed until they died. In many cases parents never came to visit. Herded together with ‘their own kind’, and hidden away behind the high brick walls and the permanently locked doors, it was a forlorn existence.

My only memory of my grandmother, Sarah, is of her sitting alone on the verandah of Eventide, the Salvation Army’s home for old ladies in Fremantle, reading the War Cry, and waiting to die. She was 76.

Paradoxically, and by contrast, the draconian mental hospital’s standard of medical care was far superior to current sloppy staffing ratios, which is, in itself, a sad indictment. All staff were state registered nurses, or supervised students. Aged care nursing can be hard and thankless work, especially when dealing with aggressive dementia patients. It takes a special kind of person and commitment. Clearly, from the litany of horrific abuse reported to the Royal Commissioners, it is imperative that standards be raised and more stringent training methods implemented, urgently. Unequivocally, laws must be changed to include mandatory jail terms for those guilty of assaulting the vulnerable. Too many unqualified, abusive carers are using our old people as a commodity; a means of eking out a meagre living. Too many arrogant owners have been allowed to operate with impunity; to use government grants to swell their coffers. While conditions in aged care facilities are said to have improved in recent times, they are still a long way from being acceptable! You can judge a nation by the way it treats it animals and its old people. We fail miserably, on both counts. The Royal Commission is shining a spotlight into one of the nation’s darkest and ugliest corners of our society; an obscenity which diminishes us as a people, and Australia as a nation. The dereliction has been ignored for decades. For various governments and owners to now argue they were unaware only serves to exacerbate their ineptitude. They should have known there was something rotten in the state of Denmark. It is their job.

My late mother, Beria, grew-up in a heartless Salvation Army Children’s Home in Western Australia; consequently, she was determined to end her days at home. She died with me holding her hand. After reading various reports, I am so grateful, despite the many vicissitudes, that I could grant her final wish.

Roland can be heard every Monday morning – 10.30 – on radio 3BA and contacted via [email protected].