“I’ll never forget that day…and I will never forgive.” On May 6, 2015, Heather Brown received a call from her husband’s aged care facility, asking her to travel from her home in Woodgate to Bundaberg to help clean him. “He was left on the veranda covered in his own faeces, for residents and visitors to see.” Ms Brown’s husband Bill, 77, has dementia and lives in the high needs unit at TriCare in Bundaberg. The facility says client care is foremost in its goals but says it can’t talk about individual incidents. That day in 2015 Mrs Brown was called in to help due to a lack of staff. She said the problem has not gone away and is lobbying for change. Last month she discovered blood on Mr Brown’s sheets. She said he had been wearing a urine-soaked pad for 12 hours which had caused the skin on his scrotum to tear and bleed. In another incident, she discovered her husband had fallen and appeared to be having a mini stroke, but no staff came immediately to her aid, as “one was busy feeding another resident”. Mrs Brown stressed that the staff were doing their best – but there were simply not enough of them. “It is a staffing issue,” Mrs Brown said. “The staff there are wonderful and they work very hard – but they are overstretched.”
