industry & reform
in December 2016, and I think they saw
the video, and it’s a very challenging and
important piece of work. It’s difficult to
gauge how many organisations actually
saw the material that was sent out by
the department, because it went in
various locations, and there was no
implementation strategy attached.
So it was good fortune that Helping
Hand as an aged care provider had some
contact with Relationships Australia, South
Australia. Relationships Australia provides
support to forgotten Australians, the stolen
generation and child migrants, and in
casual conversation, it emerged that there
was a real need to do some work in this
area, so a partnership formed between
the two organisations which provided a
powerful base for more work.
What kind of specific things does your
organisation do in that community?
What we’ve undertaken to do – in what is
still quite a short-term project, and we’re
hoping that more work can be done in
this space and that more funding can be
applied – is to start talking directly with
forgotten Australians about what their
needs are and how they want aged care
providers to respond to their needs.
So we really embarked on a very
significant consultation and co-design
project with forgotten Australians in South
Australia to see what their needs and issues
were, and as a result a variety of things
have happened, which is terrific.
What are their needs, and what can
aged care providers do to make these
people more comfortable in care?
The big difference for forgotten Australians
is that other individuals want choice,
independence and care as part of their
aged care service provision, but forgotten
Australians were actually abused in
institutional settings, and by instruments
of the state, voluntary organisations and
churches. So, while other older individuals
may well have had experiences of trauma,
they won’t necessarily have come about
as a result of this systemic failure of
institutions and government.
That’s important to understand, and a
point of distinction for this group, and why
their needs for maintaining choice, control,
dignity and independence are so amplified,
and that’s really underpinned their
responses to us. They want to be assured
that their voices will be heard, because as
children their voices weren’t heard, and
that’s really a critical issue.
So, yes, the implications have been vast
for many of them, and lifelong, because
you’re shaped by trauma experienced as
a child. It’s not something that leaves you.
And people have had varied outcomes,
but by and large, there is real limitations
on people’s trust in authority structures.
There’s a great deal of reticence around
the medical profession. Any authority
structures, actually, have been structures
which in their experience caused them
harm, so understandably when you come
into a more regulated system again, and
where medical authority and power are
dominant, that’s going to trigger and raise
a variety of concerns.
It covers not just physical set-up
and access, but things like if you’ve
experienced sexual abuse, it may influence
whether or not you can cope with certain
practices or the gender of your carer.
If you’ve been exposed to terrible food
as a child, there will be certain things
that you will never eat. Or if you had no
possessions, or they were taken from you,
what possessions you do have may have
an elevated importance.
It also extends to things like not
necessarily having the same network
of family and supporters around you,
because children were removed from
those contexts, so they were often very
likely to be more isolated and not have
advocates and family members who were
there to care for them.
So all of those things add up to a real
fear of going into an aged care setting and
being exposed and vulnerable.
As a result of some of these things
you’ve learned, are you and this group
now actively engaging with aged
care providers? Are they listening and
shaping their ideas in how they set
up these facilities with a view to the
forgotten Australians?
These are early days, but Helping Hand
has managed, with the guidance of some
terrific forgotten Australians, to create
a policy statement for the organisation,
which can act as a starting point for
other providers to say, “How do we want
to formally recognise the needs of this
particular group of people, and how might
we respond to it?”
So our executive has actually approved
that, and we’re in the process of getting
the policy statement published, and it will
become a publicly available document.
We did share this information with other
providers at the LASA Conference recently,
and we also held a forum for other
aged care providers in South Australia
to update them on our work, and we’ve
been delighted with the response from
some of the other providers who are really
interested in what we’ve been doing, and
are looking forward to our work which we
will be sharing publicly.
So it does set up a situation where
others can start saying, “Well, how are
we recognising this group, and what care
are we going to consider providing, and
how might we approach working with
them to provide the best possible care and
assurances of wellbeing into the future?”
We’re quite optimistic, but we would be
very enthusiastic to be able to continue
this work. There’s a lot that needs to be
done in developing a better understanding
of how to care for older people in a variety
of settings, whether it’s residential or
home-based care.
An approach to trauma-informed care
is something we’re very keen to develop
more, along with good screening tools,
and a variety of other methods to help us
identify and respond to the group.
Is there any government help, or
engagement with government? Are
they seeing this as a priority issue?
Government has expressed interest
in it, and we have been able to share
information about the project, but we
do need to emphasise that, at this point,
Helping Hand has been able to do this
To be honest, I don’t
think the aged care sector
particularly picked up on
this issue.
work because of philanthropic funds, and
at this stage we’ve been dependent on that
for engaging in this work.
We are looking and working hard
with government to see what other
opportunities there are to fund this work.
Fortunately, Flinders University in South
Australia has also just attracted some
research funds in their health department,
and they’ll be doing some more work on
literature searches and research in relation
to screening tools. So there is growing
interest in this work, and we’re hopeful that
we will get a wider range of support into
the future. ■
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