Author: Sarah Russell

List aged care with an outbreak of Covid-19

In early August 2020, Victoria had Covid-19 outbreaks raging in over 100 private aged care homes, yet the government refused to tell us which ones.

At a Senate inquiry hearing on August 4, 2020, Dr Brendan Murphy, secretary of the Department of Health, and Senator Richard Colbeck, the Minister for Aged Care, refused to name the aged care homes. They explained that providers didn’t want to be publicly named because they were worried about “reputational damage”.

It is not the role of the Department of Health or the government to protect aged care homes from reputational damage. Imagine the government refusing to tell the public which schools, workplaces, restaurants or child-care centres had Covid outbreaks because of concerns about “reputational damage”.

Using several sources, including members of my Aged Care Matters Facebook Group and Dr Marie Dela Rama’s Google map: Covid-19 outbreaks in Australian nursing homes, I identified many of the aged care homes in Victoria that had an outbreak* of Covid-19.  This list was not verified by the government.
(*In aged care homes, and “outbreak is defined as one positive case – either staff or resident).
I am aware many aged care homes did everything within their power to protect residents and staff from Covid-19. In some cases, staff came to work asymptomatic.
Alarmingly, 70 to 80 per cent of healthcare workers infected with COVID-19 during Victoria’s second wave of infections caught the infection at work. This suggests inadequate infection control procedures.

In my view, it was unconscionable for important information about aged care homes to be kept top secret. I shared this list in the interests of transparency. It had nothing to do with “naming, shaming or blaming”.

On 11 September, and after much ado, the government began to share data about aged care homes with outbreaks. This data should never have been top secret.