Recent events which saw an elderly woman with dementia living in an aged care facility hospitalised are tragic and deeply upsetting for many older Australians.
Our thoughts go out to everyone impacted by this tragic event.
While COTA Australia is unaware of the circumstances surrounding the incident and cannot comment on the events leading to Ms Clare Nowland being hospitalised at all, it is clear that more needs to be done to increase society’s understanding of dementia across the board.
While situations like this are thankfully very rare, it does highlight the need for everyone working across aged care, and other industries such as healthcare and emergency services, to be trained to increase their knowledge and understanding of dementia care so that we can ensure people with dementia are receiving the proactive, best practice support they need and deserve.
The focus must now be on the investigation and on learning from this event so that we don’t see a repeat of an incident like this in the future.
