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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones - this is 7am.

Last week, 95-year-old great-grandmother Clare Nowland died, after allegedly being tasered by a police officer. That officer will now face court, and we will learn more about what led up to the incident, and what contributed to Nowland’s death. But the biggest question is how the police ended up confronting an elderly person in aged care, who was distressed and in need of help.

Today, senior reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton, on the systemic failures that surround the death of Clare Nowland.

It’s Tuesday May 30.

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RUBY

So, Rick, Clare Nowland died last week after being tasered by a police officer. She was a frail 95 year old great-grandmother in a nursing home. So, my first question is - why was a taser used on her?

RICK:

Yeah, that's the big question at the moment. So this happened about two weeks ago now, and it was in the early hours of the morning of Wednesday, the 17th of May, around about 4 a.m., when police get a phone call from staff at Yallambee Lodge, which is an aged care home in Cooma in regional New South Wales. Now Yallambee Lodge specialises in residents with high care needs, including dementia. And the staff apparently told police that they needed assistance because this particular resident, Clare Nowland, who is 95 years old or.. who was 95 years old and suffered from dementia, had grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen and they were unable to de-escalate the situation, as they say, in aged care. And so for reasons possibly due to start feeling unsafe and they've called the cops. Now, police arrived there, they’re unable to get Ms. Nowland to put the knife down. She's clearly scared and confused, which is the hallmark of people being in the middle of a dementia episode. This is not unknown information to people who work in aged care. It shouldn't be unknown information to the police, by the way. And so she continues to approach police officers, which is the original telling of it from the police themselves. But of course, they then added she's using a walking frame, she's using a Zimmer frame, and she's doing it quite slowly by their own admission. And of course, they consider that to be a point at which they pull the trigger on a taser. Now, this is allegedly deployed by a 33 year old senior constable, Christian White. Mrs. Nolen falls backwards. She hits the head, she fractures her skull, and she ends up in hospital with a brain bleed for about a week before she eventually dies from those injuries. And she died surrounded by her family. The whole thing is unimaginable, but it really does raise some pretty significant questions about the police response for a start, and then about aged care more generally.

RUBY:

Hm. Well, let's talk further about the police response because there's the initial incident and obviously questions around whether that Taser should have been pulled. But then there's what happens after that. And it takes the police quite a while to actually disclose the incident publicly. And at first they actually don't mention that there was a taser involved. So tell me about how that information came to light and why it was that the police kept that under wraps initially.

RICK:

Yeah, it's really interesting question, actually, because I found out in the it's only a small technical thing, but the first warning that journalists got that something had happened was actually from the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, which is a separate body in New South Wales, which put out a media alert saying they're aware of an incident. But when at least one journalist called the New South Wales Police media, they were told that they had no record of anything out of Cooma, which is just odd. Later that afternoon/evening, the cops did put out a statement. They mentioned that there was an interaction with police between a 95 year old woman and police, an interaction which is kind of a hallmark of this passive language that police officers usually use in statements where they've done something, allegedly, done something wrong, and there was no mention of the use of a taser in that first release. All they said was that an elderly woman sustained injuries during this interaction with police. By Thursday afternoon, this was more than a day after the incident happened. The media had begun reporting that Ms. Nowland had been tasered, but it wasn't until 9:57 a.m. on Friday, two days later, that police first mentioned that fact in an official statement to death. Two days. Now, Peter Cotter, the New South Wales assistant commissioner, gave a press conference shortly after where he gave more details.

Archival Tape – Peter Cotter:

“At the time she was tasered she was approaching the police. But it is fair to say that at a slow pace she had a walking frame. But she had a knife. I can't take it any further as to what was going through anyone's mind when the use of the taser…”

RICK:

And in the days since the New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb has claimed the reason for a meeting, the Taser was that extended members of Nowland's family hadn't been contacted yet and police didn't want them to learn the detail about the taser from media reports. She has defended the handling of that particular matter.

RUBY:

Okay. And now that Clare Nowland has died, it's even more important that there is transparency around what happened and that we understand exactly what led up to the incident. And, you know, if it's appropriate, if there are also consequences. So can we talk a bit here about the mechanisms for full accountability, What's likely to happen next?

RICK:

Well, I guess, you know, there were some things that I guess had to happen along the way to reassure public trust. And one of those was that before we had any real answers was that the senior constable who allegedly deployed his Taser was suspended with pay before being charged the next day with three different offences, including the most serious offence of the lot: reckless, grievous bodily harm. Now that charge, we are not precisely sure of the timeline, but that charge was on or around the time that Mrs. Nowland died. And Senior Constable Kristian White will be in court on July 5th for the first mention of that case. Now, we've obviously got two significant levels of institutional deficiency to look into. Now we've got the police force and then we've got aged care more generally as a sector. And those are now firmly kind of in play for public scrutiny. Now, on the one hand, we've got the commissioner, Karen Webb, who hasn't been in the job all that long. I think it's about 18 months. She's kind of embarked on this quite bizarre, I think, media blitz to try and both reassure the community about what happened.

Archival Tape – Radio Host

“The Police Commissioner is Karen Webb and joining us now on ABC Radio, Sydney. Good morning.”

Archival Tape – Karen Webb

“Good morning, Sarah”.

Archival Tape – Radio Host

“So I understand you've been with the family.”

Archival Tape – Karen Webb

“I have. I thought it was appropriate that I visited that family to talk to them about the circumstances…”

RICK:

But in some instances, it seems like a media blitz has also been to keep the family in the tent to make sure that, you know, she's out there talking about what happened because the family are by the bedside of Mrs. Nowland. But Karen Webb hasn't really done a great job. I don't think of reassuring or soothing the public mind because she came under a huge amount of opprobrium for saying that she wasn't going to watch the body cam footage, which they have of Mrs. Nowland being tased, which would show precisely what happened in that moment, because she wanted to get a clearer picture of everything that happened up to during and after. But I mean, is there a clearer picture than vision? I don't know that there is. And also, not only did she take what she wasn't going to watch it, but she said it would be courageous not to. Hmm. Which is just frankly, a weird thing to say.

Archival Tape – News host

“I think you've got a duty to watch it. You're the most senior officer in New South Wales. You will make the final decision about whether this officer remains in the force. I know it's not going to be pretty, but in the end, I think it's your duty to watch it, Commissioner?”

Archival Tape – Karen Webb:

“Well, that's right. In the end I might, Ben, but I need to have it in the context of all the other statements and evidence. And I'm waiting for that to occur. It's important that we follow a process, and I've said that clearly from the beginning…”

RICK:

And so, of course, we do have the Law Enforcement Commission conduct commission now independently monitoring that stuff. And I suspect that will form part of their purview. It's like, has this thing been handled properly? What's interesting to me is that the police commissioner, Karen Webb, has also admitted that she's unsure the police are the right people to be getting called into situations like this.

Archival Tape – Journalist:

“Are police the right people to be responding to an uncooperative or even a violent person with dementia?”

Archival Tape – Karen Webb:

“That’s a big question and I don’t have the answer immediately.”

RICK:

And maybe this is partly part of that distancing themselves from, you know.. Or trying to add some doubt into the mind of the public about, you know, maybe the police weren't equipped to deal with this. I don't think they were. Therefore, does she think that's exculpatory? Does she think that that is ameliorating in any particular sense about the conduct of the officer involved? That will come up in court and it is before the court so we shouldn't prejudge too much of that.

RUBY:

But there is a good question there, Rick, around why police officers were brought into the aged care home in the first place. Why does a situation like that require a police presence? Can we talk a bit about that? And I guess the questions that you have around aged care and their responsibility, their role in this?

RICK:

Yeah, I mean, that one seems more obvious to me, having written a lot about aged care as a system over many years now, including covering the Royal Commission. They are woefully under-resourced, underfunded, understaffed, under-equipped, like in almost every potential way that you could imagine it, particularly as… I was talking to a registered nurse, Jane Newman, who's been in this sector for 20 years. and I asked them, would you, you know, would you send someone to hospital because you can't cope with them in the nursing home? And she said ‘Oh, absolutely. It happens all the time’. Particularly when you've got poorly paid, poorly resourced staff, the personal care workers who are overworked, and there's not enough of them as it is. And something happens on the shift that makes them feel for their own safety or that they're not comfortable handling because of the risk attached to it. You're dealing with people's lives. She said, yeah, you call a paramedic, you might send them to hospital in extreme situations, you might call the police. Certainly you have to call the police if they're missing, if someone absconds. And that happens a lot with dementia patients. But if they're worried about their safety, yeah, because they're not they're not trained for this. And Jane said it happens all the time.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY

So Rick, we’ve got a situation where there are overworked staff who are calling the police because they don’t necessarily have the resources to cope when something goes wrong in an aged care home they work in. It seems like what happened to Claire Nowland could have happened in any nursing home in the country. And I know you’ve come across other families who have had similar experiences. So tell me about what you’ve heard?

RICK:

Yeah, I was talking to the family of Rachel Graham, who was a resident of St. Bezels Randwick in Sydney run by the Greek Orthodox Church. Now she also had dementia and again another beloved grandmother who had such a beautiful life. She was a librarian, saw every theatre production in Sydney for 60 years, ends up in care because she needs some help. She has dementia and dementia manifests it with difficult behaviours, as they call them, where people need behavioural interventions. And in Rachel's case she was wandering, she was hollering, calling out very common and the staff couldn't deal with her. Now the staff were in a dedicated dementia wing of St Basils and three times that year in 2020, Rachel Graham was sent to the local private hospital for no reason other than the fact that she had dementia. In fact, the hospital told her daughter, Emma Graham, ‘Look, she's got dementia. There's nothing wrong with her’. And then they'd kept her overnight and they sent her back. This is happening in aged care homes all across the country where staff are at their wits end or they're not properly equipped. And so they send them to hospital or they call out for authorities to do what, you know, they either can't do or aren't willing to do. Sometimes there are management edicts that say, you know, to save money or to save time, just shunt them off to hospital. And that's what happened to Rachel. And then in October of 2020, they called the police, because they are, again, a dedicated dementia wing. No one there had been given any dementia training. They called the police. The police put two sets of handcuffs on Rachel Graham.

Archival Tape – Rachel Graham:

“Why? That’s rubbish.”

Archival Tape – Policeofficer:

“Because we don’t want to hold you!”

Archival Tape – Rachel Graham:

“You don’t have to hold me”

RICK:

Again, this bodycam footage, which we only have as a public to be able to view it, we only have it because Emma Graham lodged essentially a freedom of information. It's a request in New South Wales to get that footage because the nursing home claimed weirdly that their CCTV footage of the entire incident cut out when the police arrived and only kicks back in when Mrs. Graham was being loaded into an ambulance without any police in the frame, no handcuffs on. And so they claim that they couldn't find any evidence of this ever happening. The body cam footage shows very clearly the whole thing.

Archival Tape – Rachel Graham:

“Why?! What are you doing…”

Archival Tape – Policeofficer:

“Just keep it still”

RICK:

And Mrs. Graham is in acute distress. She's scared, she's confused. It's exactly how Mrs. Nowland would have felt when confronted by people trying to calm her down, but doing the exact opposite. And Mrs. Graham was then taken to hospital.

Archival Tape – Rachel Graham:

[screaming]

RICK:

Now, the reason all of that happened was because they weren't equipped, but also that particular nursing home St Basil's Randwick. Didn't deal with the aftermath particularly well. And I think they were investigated by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission and they breached 36 out of the then 44 quality standards. And that was a good home, that's I think that's the bigger point here. That was an expensive home. Coomba, the Yallambee Lodge where Mrs. Nowland was tasered is by all metrics, by all accounts, one of the good ones.

RUBY:

Hmm. Yeah. It sounds like the issue is perhaps not with the individual homes, but with the system as a whole and a lack of resources, a lack of registered nurses who might be able to kind of better handle situations like Rachel Grimes and Claire Nowland. So if that is the case, why is it that we're seeing this trend towards having fewer and less experienced staff in aged care homes and where does that kind of slide begin?

RICK:

The state of play for aged care at the moment, it goes all the way back to John Howard. It goes back to the rewriting of the legislation in 1997, the very next year in 1998, there was another change made to that legislation which removed the requirement for registered nurses to be onsite 2/7. In the olden days there used to be low care, aged care and high care. Low care is where most people went and they were low care. There were a bunch of oldies who needed a little bit of extra support, but they were mostly there for some care and then they were doing entertainment or playing games or doing puzzles and all that kind of stuff. And it was a lovely work environment. As the sector has become increasingly under-resourced, the acuity, what they call acuity of residence, which is the care they need, the high level, the complex level of dementia support, you know, behavioural disturbances that has increased exponentially and continues to do so.

And what we've seen is this trend of cost cutting over time to ensure profits, particularly as the cost of delivering care got harder. And so they were trying to save money elsewhere. And we end up in this situation where you're getting increasingly, as we've seen, you know, the proportion of personal care workers went from 50% of all aged care direct care staff to 71.2%, while registered nurses fell from about 21% to about 15% and enrolled nurses from 15 to 9%. So it's a complete inversion of quality and skill. And now we're left with this situation where the Labour Party is back in government. They're trying to do something to fix that, so we've got a new requirement coming in on July one for mandatory presence of registered nurses at all hours, at every single aged care facility in the country. They know they won't meet that target on July 1, even though it's mandatory because there aren't enough of them. They need another 862 according to their own modelling. But the requirement is there and I think rightly, the Minister says ‘Look, it’s better to have the mandatory requirement there and start and we meet some of it, than to not try at all’.

RUBY:

So Rick, what we have then we have a police force that is accused of using force in situations that should be de-escalated. An aged care system that doesn't have enough experienced staff. And the fact that things like this happen in, quote unquote, good homes, that’s a sign that it's not just that some homes need to get better at doing what they do - it's systemic, the whole sector needs to be rethought. So to thAT, what kind of reform would help?

RICK:

Yeah, it is absolutely systemic, There's no doubt about that. The registered nurse I spoke to who's done this sector for so long now, Jane Nueben - she made a really important point - It's been made to me before - that if you are getting care in a hospital, the hospital might get 1500 dollars a day for your medical care. And that is, all they have to do is give you the bed and provide the care. If you are an aged care resident, the most you can get is maybe $300 if you're lucky as a provider and you have to provide all of their medical care, plus all of their food, all of their entertainment, the auxiliary supports, all of that has to be done with 300 bucks. So it's just an economic equation. Right? And there's this argument that came up in the Royal Commission. Why is aged care considered separate to health? Originally, it was philosophical because we didn't want people to think that it was this terrible hospital they had to go into. It was their home. Where they were going to go and live out their retirement. It was going to be happy and nice. But the reality now is that with Home care in particular, which is a great outcome and a great policy, a lot of people who are able to are ageing at home for longer with support. And so aged care homes, nursing homes are becoming essentially two speed things. They do dementia care, which is 80% of the population. Or they do palliative care. They're not good at either of those things because they have to possibly the most acute deserving of resources, medical applications we have in this country and aged care homes have been kind of left with them without the commensurate uplift in resources that is required to do those jobs properly. So give them money!

RUBY:

The solution is in some ways obvious.

RICK:

People always say that right? Sometimes they’re like “Give them money but no…”, just give them money. And to be fair, Labor has a long road of reform ahead of it and they have every chance to stuff this up, right, like any government. But they've made a great start. They’ve put money in the budget for pay rises for aged care staff. Not everyone and not enough, but it’s a start. They’ve put money in the budget for aged care homes that can’t afford it for that policy of mandatory aged care nurses by July 1, and to help make the sector more viable as whole while also trying to put a line between what taxpayer money goes to homes and where it is spent. With those reforms, money is important as long as you can tie it to actual progress. And that's where I think we begin the next chapter of the story.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you for your time.

RICK:

Thanks, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

West Australian premier Mark McGowan has resigned after over six years as the state’s leader and will leave parliament.

McGowan won unprecedented support – with one poll during the COVID pandemic rating his public approval at 91%, a record for an Australian state premier.

But McGowan’s term was not without controversy, with the state’s supreme court ruling that conditions children were detained in at the states’ only youth detention centre were unlawful – and his government approving major new gas developments.

And…

PwC Australia’s new acting chief executive has stood down nine more senior partners at the firm as the scandal over the company using confidential information about Australia’s tax system deepens.

Acting CEO, Kristin Stubbins, who took over the post after the resignation of the previous CEO due to his knowledge of the affair, said quote: “Specifically, I apologise to the community; to the Australian government for breaching your confidentiality”.

I’m Ruby Jones - this is 7am - see you tomorrow.

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