A Victorian aged care home is being investigated after a resident with advanced dementia was scalded with hot water and received second-degree burns while being given a sponge bath.
The resident, 89-year-old Laurel James, was left with burns that blistered from the right side of her chest down to her ankle.
The chief executive of John Curtin Aged Care, Jenni Sewell, confirmed to Guardian Australia that the incident which occurred at the organisation’s Creswick facility on 19 June had been referred to the aged care complaints commissioner.
“I won’t be making any further comment,” Sewell said on Wednesday.
The incident came to light after the woman’s daughter, Glenda Hipwell, called 774 ABC radio in Melbourne to say she received a call from the centre on 19 June and was told that her mother had been scalded and was going to be transferred to hospital.
“When I arrived at the facility there was just pandemonium, I couldn’t believe what was going on in Mum’s room,” Hipwell told the ABC.
“There was about eight staff in there and two ambulance officers, and everybody was shouting and reaching across Mum.”
Hipwell said she and her family had previously complained to the centre and the John Curtin Aged Care board about a foot injury, which staff had failed to notice had deteriorated and became “like an ulcer, oozing pus”. James has since been moved by her family to another centre.
A spokesman for the aged care complaints commissioner, Rae Lamb, said the commissioner was unable to comment on specific details of the case.
“Our focus is on resolution because the important thing is to address whatever has gone wrong and ensure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
“The complaints commissioner has a range of powers and can and does take action when complaints expose failings in the care and services for people receiving Australian government funded aged care. She can direct service providers to take action and they are required to comply with this.”
The chief executive of the Councils on the Ageing, Ian Yates, said repeated incidents happening within the same facilities were “more common than they should be”.
“We believe that there are some providers who don’t have a proactive attitude towards encouraging and investigating and taking note of complaints, and that’s certainly an area that needs more focus going forward,” he said.
Yates said the system of allocating bed licences and government funding to residential care providers should also be stopped. Instead, he said, consumers should be given the funding and choose which provider they wished to allocate it to.
“If we had a system whereby people controlled the money, then the good providers would be able to expand in response to demand,” he said.
