Aged care residents and their families are caught in the crossfire of an escalating stand-off between the federal government and the sector over visiting rights during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ahead of a meeting with providers on Friday, the government suggested it was prepared to force homes to allow each resident two visitors a day, in line with official health guidelines, if operators did not ease their own rules.
On Monday, a coalition of 1,000 aged care homes and their representatives roundly rejected the government’s request and disputed claims elevated by the prime minister that some homes were simply locking residents in their rooms.
“Aged care providers have made extremely difficult decisions for enhanced resident protections on visitation in order to reduce the number of potential exposures to the vulnerable people in our care,” they said in the statement.
The impasse leaves families and residents at times abiding by vastly different rules at different homes, regardless of whether there have been confirmed cases within a facility.
In March, the government launched new guidelines that stated aged care homes could allow residents to have two visitors per day.
But the Guardian reported that many of country’s largest operators had gone beyond that, banning visits in what some providers described as “voluntary lockdown”, prompting concerns from advocates of a knee-jerk reaction.
The Council on the Ageing chief executive, Ian Yates, told Guardian Australia on Monday he remained concerned about the level of visitor restrictions imposed by some providers.
“I’m listening to some saying their members are very flexible, for example about people who are dying or residents who have severe dementia, but we have too many cases where that is not happening,” he said.
Yates acknowledged there were “two sides” to the debate and proposed a code of conduct to providers as a middle ground.
“But so far we haven’t had that reciprocated,” he said.
“If the provider feels the need to be stronger than the national guidelines, there [should be] certain guarantees. In that case then everybody would know what is happening.
“At the moment it’s quite arbitrary. Two providers in the same suburb will be doing something different.”
Globally, aged care facilities have been ravaged by Covid-19, with the WHO reporting that up to half of all deaths in Europe were in nursing homes.
In New South Wales, authorities are dealing with a cluster at Newmarch House, run by non-profit Anglicare, which was sparked when a staff member tested positive, and has killed six residents and seen more than 50 residents and staff contract the virus.
Patricia Sparrow, chief executive of non-profit peak body Aged and Community Services Australia, told the Guardian on Monday providers needed the right to impose restrictions beyond the AHPPC guidance.
She acknowledged that providers had instituted extra visitor restrictions in an “number of instances” but said the peak body did not have data stating how many of its members had gone beyond the government guidelines.
Although the outbreak at Newmarch had been sparked by a staff member, Sparrow said it highlighted why aged care homes were so insistent that they be able to further limit visits.
The decision of providers to dig in sets up a showdown with the government after Morrison took a hard line on Friday, saying the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee’s “very clear medical advice” was that visits were safe.
He said unless providers voluntarily loosened restrictions, he would force them to apply for an exemption to impose rules that were tougher than the health guidelines.
“There are quite valid reasons why you would have exemptions, particularly as we’ve seen in north-west Tasmania at the moment, or what we’ve seen in western Sydney or in other places,” he said.
“But more broadly, having people stuck in their rooms, not being able to be visited by their loved ones and carers and other support people, that’s not OK.”
Sparrow outright rejected claims that residents were locked in their rooms in facilities where visitors had been banned.
Some providers have adopted the use of iPads and other digital tools to allow residents to communicate with loved ones, while others have established other novel methods such as “window visits”.
While he pointed to these positive examples, Yates said there was also a need for provider peak bodies to pull their “recalcitrant members into line”.
He cited cases such as an operator threatening to call the police on a family attempting to communicate with a loved one from afar.
“They were just trying to communicate through a window,” he said.
Yates added that only “a minority of people in residential care” had family coming to visiting them.
“The idea that there will be a flood of people coming in is a bit carried away,” he said.
The Guardian contacted the aged care minister, Richard Colbeck, for comment.
