THE SILVER REVOLUTION: the faces of Australia’s aged-care crisis
A 105-year-old dancer, a family who busted Gran out of a rest home during COVID and an academic who became an advocate after her parents went into care – Samantha Trenoweth meets the people who want to see greater kindness in aged care.
It was a wet Thursday afternoon in March. A southerly was blowing. Angela Finn closed her laptop and gazed out her front window on a wild, grey Coogee Beach. She was feeling a little bit teary. Australia had that day recorded its 13th death from COVID-19. Prime Minister Scott Morrison was urging people to stay at home and stressing the need for social distancing. Angela’s mother, Pam Bryce, lived across town in an aged care home, and she’d just received an email alerting her that a lockdown would be imposed there immediately. There would be no visitors allowed in and no daytrips out … indefinitely.
“We had just a day’s notice. It was such a shock,” Angela tells The Weekly. “I was worried. Mum is 87. She has been diagnosed with vascular dementia. With her cognitive decline, the phone is difficult for her. I was petrified for her mental and physical wellbeing. The bushfires at the start of the year had made her very anxious and when COVID hit, her confusion and anxiety increased tremendously. She worried about her family. She would ask again and again, ‘What is COVID? What does Mr Morrison want us to do? Is everyone going to be all right?’”
The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety had released its interim report – ominously titled ‘Neglect’ – just five months earlier, and that was a worry, too. While the home that Pam was in was “not one of those places you read about; it was a good home”, Angela knew the pandemic would create extra pressure. And she knew the aged care sector was already at breaking point. Like so many families around Australia, she began to wonder if she could bring her mother home.
The night before the lockdown, Angela didn’t sleep at all, but the next day she rose with a fire in her belly. “How could I leave Mum alone?” she says. “How could I entrust her care to strangers in a time of crisis? It didn’t feel right at all.”
Thanks to COVID restrictions, her weekend job as a celebrant was on hiatus and the charity that employed her on weekdays had sent everyone home to work remotely. Plus, fortuitously, her youngest daughter Eloise had just graduated from university and was looking to move out on her own. Angela