NEWS-HR

Blue Care – Uniting Church is set to defend a s.394 (Application for unfair dismissal remedy) lodge by an ex-staff member (Dalton).

An application by Health Services Union (s.229 – Application for a bargaining order) will be decided by Commissioner Cribb in conference room E & F level 6 in Melbourne at 2.30pm.

A s.394 (unfair dismissal) claim by Candy Towers against Awabakal Local Aboriginal Land Council has been dismissed by Commissioner Saunders in Newcastle on 14 August 2017.

Two applications by Health Services Union (s.472 – application for an order relating to certain partial work bans) (s.459 – application to extend the 30 day period in which industrial action is authorised by protected action ballot) are set for hearing before Commissioner Cribb in conference room E & F – level 6 in Melbourne at 2.30pm.

Three elderly residents at a Mulgrave nursing home have died of flu-related symptoms after an outbreak of the illness swept through the centre. The victims, aged 81, 94 and 103, all had other underlying conditions and died last month at the Royal Freemasons’ Monash Gardens home.

South Australia’s new $2.3 billion Royal Adelaide Hospital is about to take its first patients. The hospital’s outpatient service will open today, less than a month before it starts treating emergencies and taking admissions. Premier Jay Weatherill says the move has posed challenges but the new RAH will be the best hospital in the country. ‘I’m confident that with the planning that’s gone into this that it will go smoothly,’ he said. Mr Weatherill says the hospital is also on track to open its emergency department from September 5.

A jar with chemicals has been removed from Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital after a scare. According to a Department of Fire and Emergency Services spokesperson, the jar was found at the Nedlands site. As a precaution, police and firefighters were called out to the scene with parts of the hospital evacuated. It remains unclear what the substance was inside the jar. It’s the second time in less than three months parts of SCGH have been evacuated due to a chemical find.

An 88 year-old man with severe and advancing dementia accused of murdering his wife of 56 years has had the charge dropped, after a court ruled he will never be fit to plead to the allegation. John Huggins has since March been charged with the murder of his 76 year-old wife Joan, whom he was accused of stabbing to death in their Piara Waters home. WA’s Supreme Court today heard that a neighbour of the couple found Mrs Huggins’ body after becoming concerned when speaking to Mr Huggins as he wandered around in the front yard of his southern suburbs home. The court was told today that a highly disoriented Mr Huggins told his neighbour that “there is a dead little girl in the house”. When the neighbour investigated, it was in fact Mrs Huggins who was inside, with fatal stab wounds. Today, Justice Stephen Hall sat on a fitness to plea hearing, where he was told that since his arrest Mr Huggins had been an in-patient at the Armadale hospital, being treated for his advancing dementia, which had markedly deteriorated in the last month. Justice Hall was told there was a strong, circumstantial case against Mr Huggins, who was being cared for by his wife at the time of her death after a long and apparently happy marriage. The court heard that previously, another violent incident had occurred when Mr Huggins became upset about his wife researching respite care on the internet.