Kedgley Sue: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Kedgley Sue: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 29 June 2010. Volume:664;Page:12249. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I congratulate the MidCentral District Health Board on its review of the quality of aged care through a special audit it undertook last year when the board was worried about the number of complaints it was receiving about the quality of care in MidCentral Health. The board was worried that the issues that were being raised could be endemic so it decided to conduct a special audit of eight facilities operated by the MidCentral District Health Board. It found instances of abuse and numerous wide-ranging and systemic problems that it said had caused significant risk to the safety of residents and had resulted in an unsafe environment for residents. The board said that many of the issues and problems that it found were breaches of the district health board contract and of the legislation. There were things such as medication errors untrained staff dispensing medicines acute shortages of staff people who had had falls and so forth not being attended to and people who had illnesses that had not been detected. I could go on and on. 
The picture that emerges from reading the MidCentral District Health Board special report is the same picture that is emerging from an investigation that Luamanuvao Winnie Laban and I are conducting around New Zealand. We have now held about 12 public meetings and we have also met with aged-care nurses and aged-care workers privately because of course many of them are not able to speak publicly about the situation for fear that they would immediately lose their jobs. 
The same picture is emerging of institutional neglect and in some cases even abuse. To give members an example last night I met with 20 aged-care workers who said that there are widespread acute shortages of staff in the sector particularly at weekends where it is commonplace for only half of the number of staff who are meant to work in an aged-care facility to be on duty. One of the reasons is that they are paid if they are lucky only 50c an hour extra to work at weekends so there will mostly be casuals students and untrained people working in the weekends and in the evenings. 
One nurse I met last night was in charge of 64 residents and another nurse was in charge of 70 residents. I asked them what happens when there are no staff in the evenings and the weekends and they said that basically they leave residents in bed all weekend. The only thing they can do is literally just leave them in bed all through the weekends and through the evenings. They said that they are simply unable to attend them and they gave me examples. We have had many reports of people who have had a fall who were left for an hour or so before someone discovered them and of people being unattended for hours on end because there literally were no staff. From my own experience when I visited an aged-care facility over a 6-week period I found a complete absence of staff. There was no one to be seen and residents were just lying in their beds day after day after day. 
The aged-care workers also talked about showers. Apparently most residents are being showered only twice a week and if they are lucky three times a week. They are not even being toileted enough. Aged-care workers will tell residents that they are sorry that they do not have enough staff and that the residents will have to wait for an hour or so. Residents are not being walked properly and not being fed properly because meals are just being left with them and they cannot feed themselves. They also get dehydrated and so on and so forth. The other concern is that apparently it is becoming routine for aged-care workers to dispense medication even though as the Minister pointed out in the House that is technically illegal.