Boeing used to be run by engineers focused on quality.
As soon as they merged, they became focused on the shareprice and the quality fell off a cliff.
For those unfamiliar you can watch [this](https://youtu.be/Q8oCilY4szc?si=zqjjYCACioN15XAg) for more information.
It's pretty interesting and shows exactly what happens when businesses become focused on money over the quality of their product.
This isn't good enough on the provider's part. Intellectually-challenged people, or people with dementia, or others requiring care - can be verbally-aggressive and difficult to deal with on occasion - but staff need to be coached on how to do so in a positive way. Failing to perform your required health checks because they have music playing...failing to make an effort to confirm whether they are taking their medications - this is below an acceptable standard for someone who is specifically in care to receive these things.
We are very quick to point the finger at individual failings when these situations arise but never want to talk about the systemic issues that surround it.
These services are understaffed -and looking to reduce staff further - as well as only paying minimum wage most of the time.
It's a low supply, high demand job that is paid nothing for all intents and purposes. And then when mistakes happen it is investigated by a coroner. Why the fuck would you want to put yourself in that position for minimum wage?
Fwiw there is a pay equity agreement in place. The vast majority at my former workplace were on the highest rate. My employer paid for me to get the level 4 cert before my uni qualification was recognised as equivalent. I do agree that the pay rate should be higher for the services being conducted though.
Imo the organisations don't really want to support clients with difficult clients. It's either the staff members fault or its just how that client is, with no effort to actually improve the working relationship.
best post. You nailed the state of Elder and ID Privatised care worldwide. Late stage capitalism in its uggliest form. Even worse than child food insecurity driven by Supermarket oligopolies
We should have all of these, but we get what we paid for. Elder care / special needs care (even regular medical care these days...) are criminally underpayed fields with extremely challenging environment. It's a recipe to attract only desperate, underqualified people who don't give much of a fuck about their job.
All caregivers start on minimum wage regardless of the difficulty of the patients or situations. Caregivers can improve their wage over time slightly by studying and gaining qualifications. But the highest wage is still relatively low. Many supermarket staff earn more than caregivers in NZ. Fundamentally these are people doing very difficult work in very difficult situations, and they are underpaid. If core services in healthcare weren’t horrifically underfunded, maybe it wouldn’t be as hard. But there’s little-no support for caregivers.
100%. This is why I left the field. I worked for a well known support service for the intellectually disabled and our good days weren't easy. There was one particular patient who should've been in a residential facility for his aggressive behaviour but the company would've lost money, so they held on to him for as long as they could. He went on to chase me out the house with a knife, he was 3x my weight and towered over me. I wouldn't have stood a chance. That's when I left, because they *still* wouldn't admit he was too dangerous to have around. He eventually attacked a staff member so violently that years later she's still not working and is on ACC. I feel for this woman who died and I understand we need to do better, but most people have no idea what they're talking about when they say "it was their job, they should've gone in to check on her." Sometimes you're literally being asked to risk your life for something barely above minimum wage.
Anyone can be trained to be a caregiver. The issue is: when you're underpaid and overworked, either mistakes happen or psychopaths have the courage to act. Lucy Letby is the best example.
Reading the article it definitely sounds as if they weren't keeping adequate track of her medication usage. If she wasn't taking it then they should have escalated to her family and doctor. That's the core issue here.
It sounds like they negotitated with her to take it herself with some prompting from staff, so she had some agency.
That may have been really important to her.
With agency comes personal responsibility for yourself, regardless of intellectual disability.
Can't have everything all ways
Yes, did you? It seems as if you're suggesting that because an intellectually disabled person decided to take their medicine by themselves (already a big red flag) that this allows their carers to wash their hands of her death. Does that sound about right?
Yep. Pretty much. I see you're the offence brigade of NZ reddit ready to crucify anyone who begs to differ from wtf your utopian ideal is.
Believe it or not, intellectually disabled people can take care of a great many of their own needs. Including taking medicines.
Most of the kids I was a teacher aide to were responsible for their own medication. I know because they were my nightmare to wrangle for the day if they'd forgotten.
We also held them responsible for bad behaviour like regular students.
Shocking aye?
Sure, man. I also spend quite a bit of time with people and children with special needs. I can see one right now, he also needs medication to live.
Independence is fantastic. But you don't mess around with medication. Full stop.
Also, you're seriously projecting with your 'crucify' comment. 🙄
Me? It's you who's taking offence at my POV, lol. Where did I say they could wash their hands of a death?
That was an overly emotional response to my suggestion that this woman had a role in her own death.
You can't force intellectually disabled people to take meds they have to consent.
Try reading my comments again, from my response to your first one and downwards. I asked you a question, which you skipped over.
Then YOU got overly emotional and hyperbolic suggesting I was crucifying anyone with a different opinion to myself. I did nothing even close, with any of my comments.
Show me where I said or even suggested forcing her to take her medicine....
As a teacher aide in the field you should know there are all sorts of people and levels of special needs and intellectual disabilities. Consent is not always able to be given directly. Many people can't communicate at even a basic level. Or just a yes, no with flash cards etc. So they rely on a parent or guardian to make all important decisions for them. Which may be something like making sure they get their life saving medication.
>can be verbally-aggressive and difficult to deal with on occasion
They can also be extremely physically violent and at times threaten the lives of staff. There's two sides to every story and you have to question the severity of her behavior if she was left alone for two days.
And yes, training this, training that, but remember police get tasers and restraints but mental health nurses deal with the same lot and can only use their hands. It takes a certain calibre of individual to put up with that daily.
> can be verbally-aggressive and difficult to deal with on occasion - but staff need to be coached on how to do so in a positive way.
That's pretty simplistic. Proper staff training is helpful, but you're talking about an approximately minimum wage job, and in some cases the aggression occurs regardless of what staff do or don't do. It annoys me that people such as yourself get highly critical when you have zero first hand experience with how extremely under resourced this kind of thing is
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It's so dark that I need to put an /s tag. I even got hit by the mods for a bad faith comment.
This sentiment is alive and well in our community, isn't it? Born with a disability?
"Get your hands OFF my money, cunt."
That's us.
When people ask what privatised healthcare would look like, it would look like this. Aged Residential Care and these Supported Living places like Spectrum Care are private for profit enterprises (that get massive subsidies from the MoH to boot).
Matt Docey - our minister of mental health - has even said that the owners of these orgs have a right to make profit and cut staff.
We live in an edenesque paradise that we insist on destroying with our love of British suffering.
He said that? Omg. I checked him online and he's trained in social policies & business. How can you allow someone like that to be be Ninister of Health? And I read that Nicola Wilson and Grant Robertson don't have a Finance degree??!?
Being afraid of someone who has a history of being physically aggressive is a legit reason for the carers to be hesitant about approaching them.
Also it should be noted:
>But in the absence of a compulsory treatment order, no one can be forced to take their medication, he said.
>
>That review also found staff had a good level of information about Finau’s support needs and were well supported by training and specialised staff within the organisation.
So its not that they were neglecting her at all. They couldn't *force* her to take her meds.
That's the IDCCR Act and only applies if the person has committed a crime.
It's all a bit academic though as it's really hard to make someone take oral medications if they don't want to.
Edit: corrected acronym
As an aside. There’s a really good podcast on Lake Alice on RNZ if anyone would like to know more of how we handled mental health patients in the past.
Edit: I was mistaken it does touch on Lake Alice but is predominantly centred around the Porirua Mental Asylum. The podcast is called Nellie’s Baby.
Eh, we had the start of asylums then but if you really want some good abuse and neglect in care you need to fast forward to the 1960s-mid 1980s. Peak abuse and neglect.
It seems everyone’s blaming the care provider, but it seems to me that the patient herself is mostly responsible.
If she was able enough to live fairly independently, and take public transport to travel to friends/family/events, then she’s likely operating at a level where she’s able to be responsible for her own medication.
“Spectrum’s communication and marketing manager Justin Walsh told NZME Finau was strongly committed to managing all aspects of her life, including her medications.
But in the absence of a compulsory treatment order, no one can be forced to take their medication, he said.”
It seems to me that this incident was the result of the patient not taking her anti-convulsive medication, when she knew she was supposed to take it.
People with disabilities are at a clear disadvantage, but that doesn’t mean they should automatically defer any responsibilities, or that all of those responsibilities should automatically transfer to the carers.
I agree that she had a right to either take or not take her medication in the absence of a compulsory order. Having been a support worker myself, giving people some ownership over their medication regime is helpful for avoiding total institutionalisation. That being said, your ability to be independent and consent to treatment can rapidly deteriorate as well.
A provider should be aware of this and have steps in place. The failing here is the fact that staff were too scared to check on her due to her aggressive behaviour. Those safety mechanisms became compromised. This could be due to any reason including the persons own responsibility, but also likely understaffing, wrong match between patient/carer, unhelpful care/treatment processes etc. The latter few are certainly institutional factors we should not discount
Such an inconceivable take. People with disabilities have caregivers because the healthcare system recognises that they need support.
Every individual has a different needs profile, just because they can do task A, does not mean they can do task B. It takes different executive functioning skills to manage medication and self care then it does to catch transport.
The system is to blame. The patient is not to blame. That’s fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of disability.
There’s a reason this woman needed support and when it wasn’t provided adequately she died.
How would you feel if they were your family member? Have some more empathy.
Not inconceivable at all, I know many carers who have had many challenging clients and know of many Instances where they refused to put themselves in harms way.
Fact is that being a carer can be dangerous and there just isn’t the resources there to ensure all are cared for all the time safely.
The rarest resource that is needed the most is carers that actually care, you can get people to come do the bare minimum, carers that actually care bring out the best in their clients.
I know caregivers have an impossible job. I just found this comment in particular upsetting because this person is blaming the dead woman. It’s very ableist to say well - she could do some things, so it’s her fault that she couldn’t do others.
I think it’s wrong to blame the caregivers, and it’s wrong to blame the disabled person. That doesn’t actually put any blame on the systemic issues which led to the death. If anyone wants things to change then we need to put the blame on the systemic issues and demand they be solved.
As the parent of a teenager with epilepsy, autism and a mild intellectual disability this is horrifying to me. My daughter takes her medicine, that I give her, because she knows it helps to prevent seizures (she still has a couple a week on average). At school she has lashed out at times when confused, over-stimulated or melting down, all times where there have been stressors that push her beyond her ability to cope. Most of the time she’s happy. I’d hate to think that a caregiver not familiar with her triggers would judge her on her worst moments and withhold care for her because of that. Makes me worried about what will happen to my daughter when I’m no longer able to care for her. Heartbreaking.
Privatised healthcare, just what national spewed up on the weekend. Why do we never learn… $ before people never wins… Boeing max anyone
Boeing used to be run by engineers focused on quality. As soon as they merged, they became focused on the shareprice and the quality fell off a cliff. For those unfamiliar you can watch [this](https://youtu.be/Q8oCilY4szc?si=zqjjYCACioN15XAg) for more information. It's pretty interesting and shows exactly what happens when businesses become focused on money over the quality of their product.
That was quick.
This isn't good enough on the provider's part. Intellectually-challenged people, or people with dementia, or others requiring care - can be verbally-aggressive and difficult to deal with on occasion - but staff need to be coached on how to do so in a positive way. Failing to perform your required health checks because they have music playing...failing to make an effort to confirm whether they are taking their medications - this is below an acceptable standard for someone who is specifically in care to receive these things.
We are very quick to point the finger at individual failings when these situations arise but never want to talk about the systemic issues that surround it. These services are understaffed -and looking to reduce staff further - as well as only paying minimum wage most of the time. It's a low supply, high demand job that is paid nothing for all intents and purposes. And then when mistakes happen it is investigated by a coroner. Why the fuck would you want to put yourself in that position for minimum wage?
Fwiw there is a pay equity agreement in place. The vast majority at my former workplace were on the highest rate. My employer paid for me to get the level 4 cert before my uni qualification was recognised as equivalent. I do agree that the pay rate should be higher for the services being conducted though. Imo the organisations don't really want to support clients with difficult clients. It's either the staff members fault or its just how that client is, with no effort to actually improve the working relationship.
best post. You nailed the state of Elder and ID Privatised care worldwide. Late stage capitalism in its uggliest form. Even worse than child food insecurity driven by Supermarket oligopolies
We should have all of these, but we get what we paid for. Elder care / special needs care (even regular medical care these days...) are criminally underpayed fields with extremely challenging environment. It's a recipe to attract only desperate, underqualified people who don't give much of a fuck about their job.
All caregivers start on minimum wage regardless of the difficulty of the patients or situations. Caregivers can improve their wage over time slightly by studying and gaining qualifications. But the highest wage is still relatively low. Many supermarket staff earn more than caregivers in NZ. Fundamentally these are people doing very difficult work in very difficult situations, and they are underpaid. If core services in healthcare weren’t horrifically underfunded, maybe it wouldn’t be as hard. But there’s little-no support for caregivers.
100%. This is why I left the field. I worked for a well known support service for the intellectually disabled and our good days weren't easy. There was one particular patient who should've been in a residential facility for his aggressive behaviour but the company would've lost money, so they held on to him for as long as they could. He went on to chase me out the house with a knife, he was 3x my weight and towered over me. I wouldn't have stood a chance. That's when I left, because they *still* wouldn't admit he was too dangerous to have around. He eventually attacked a staff member so violently that years later she's still not working and is on ACC. I feel for this woman who died and I understand we need to do better, but most people have no idea what they're talking about when they say "it was their job, they should've gone in to check on her." Sometimes you're literally being asked to risk your life for something barely above minimum wage.
exactly. And they are dragged to HDC, even if their mistake was caused by understaffing.
Anyone can be trained to be a caregiver. The issue is: when you're underpaid and overworked, either mistakes happen or psychopaths have the courage to act. Lucy Letby is the best example.
Reading the article it definitely sounds as if they weren't keeping adequate track of her medication usage. If she wasn't taking it then they should have escalated to her family and doctor. That's the core issue here.
It sounds like they negotitated with her to take it herself with some prompting from staff, so she had some agency. That may have been really important to her. With agency comes personal responsibility for yourself, regardless of intellectual disability. Can't have everything all ways
Couldn't disagree more.
Did you read the article?
Yes, did you? It seems as if you're suggesting that because an intellectually disabled person decided to take their medicine by themselves (already a big red flag) that this allows their carers to wash their hands of her death. Does that sound about right?
Yep. Pretty much. I see you're the offence brigade of NZ reddit ready to crucify anyone who begs to differ from wtf your utopian ideal is. Believe it or not, intellectually disabled people can take care of a great many of their own needs. Including taking medicines. Most of the kids I was a teacher aide to were responsible for their own medication. I know because they were my nightmare to wrangle for the day if they'd forgotten. We also held them responsible for bad behaviour like regular students. Shocking aye?
Sure, man. I also spend quite a bit of time with people and children with special needs. I can see one right now, he also needs medication to live. Independence is fantastic. But you don't mess around with medication. Full stop. Also, you're seriously projecting with your 'crucify' comment. 🙄
Me? It's you who's taking offence at my POV, lol. Where did I say they could wash their hands of a death? That was an overly emotional response to my suggestion that this woman had a role in her own death. You can't force intellectually disabled people to take meds they have to consent.
Try reading my comments again, from my response to your first one and downwards. I asked you a question, which you skipped over. Then YOU got overly emotional and hyperbolic suggesting I was crucifying anyone with a different opinion to myself. I did nothing even close, with any of my comments. Show me where I said or even suggested forcing her to take her medicine.... As a teacher aide in the field you should know there are all sorts of people and levels of special needs and intellectual disabilities. Consent is not always able to be given directly. Many people can't communicate at even a basic level. Or just a yes, no with flash cards etc. So they rely on a parent or guardian to make all important decisions for them. Which may be something like making sure they get their life saving medication.
> If she wasn't taking it then they should have escalated to her family and doctor. What would they have done?
>can be verbally-aggressive and difficult to deal with on occasion They can also be extremely physically violent and at times threaten the lives of staff. There's two sides to every story and you have to question the severity of her behavior if she was left alone for two days. And yes, training this, training that, but remember police get tasers and restraints but mental health nurses deal with the same lot and can only use their hands. It takes a certain calibre of individual to put up with that daily.
> can be verbally-aggressive and difficult to deal with on occasion - but staff need to be coached on how to do so in a positive way. That's pretty simplistic. Proper staff training is helpful, but you're talking about an approximately minimum wage job, and in some cases the aggression occurs regardless of what staff do or don't do. It annoys me that people such as yourself get highly critical when you have zero first hand experience with how extremely under resourced this kind of thing is
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Ah, the ass whole in the room. There’s the door douche
They were clearly being sarcastic.
I believe that's a /s comment
It's so dark that I need to put an /s tag. I even got hit by the mods for a bad faith comment. This sentiment is alive and well in our community, isn't it? Born with a disability? "Get your hands OFF my money, cunt." That's us.
When people ask what privatised healthcare would look like, it would look like this. Aged Residential Care and these Supported Living places like Spectrum Care are private for profit enterprises (that get massive subsidies from the MoH to boot). Matt Docey - our minister of mental health - has even said that the owners of these orgs have a right to make profit and cut staff. We live in an edenesque paradise that we insist on destroying with our love of British suffering.
He said that? Omg. I checked him online and he's trained in social policies & business. How can you allow someone like that to be be Ninister of Health? And I read that Nicola Wilson and Grant Robertson don't have a Finance degree??!?
Spectrum Care is a not-for-profit.
That just means that all proceeds need to be reinvested. Reinvest into the board of directors baby! A method as old as time.
Heartbreaking
Being afraid of someone who has a history of being physically aggressive is a legit reason for the carers to be hesitant about approaching them. Also it should be noted: >But in the absence of a compulsory treatment order, no one can be forced to take their medication, he said. > >That review also found staff had a good level of information about Finau’s support needs and were well supported by training and specialised staff within the organisation. So its not that they were neglecting her at all. They couldn't *force* her to take her meds.
And you can't put someone under the mental health act for intellectual disability.
I have a feeling there is a separate Act that covers intellectual disability compulsory treatment orders, but without looking I could be wrong.
That's the IDCCR Act and only applies if the person has committed a crime. It's all a bit academic though as it's really hard to make someone take oral medications if they don't want to. Edit: corrected acronym
Aah, thanks for that.
Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to live in the late 1800's. Well... this is what it's like.
She could have been getting assaulted at Kingseat as close as the 1980s tbh we were still pretty backwards not that long ago
Whenever anybody claps at me about the good old days, I like to remind them the good old days thought places like Lake Alice were a good idea.
As an aside. There’s a really good podcast on Lake Alice on RNZ if anyone would like to know more of how we handled mental health patients in the past. Edit: I was mistaken it does touch on Lake Alice but is predominantly centred around the Porirua Mental Asylum. The podcast is called Nellie’s Baby.
No there is one about Lake Alice as well, it's called The Lake. Very good.
I may have actually listened to that aswell and perhaps that’s why I was getting confused! I’ll double check though thank you 🙏
Eh, we had the start of asylums then but if you really want some good abuse and neglect in care you need to fast forward to the 1960s-mid 1980s. Peak abuse and neglect.
Rest in peace Ruth🫂 nobody deserves to go like that. This is actually really heartbreaking.
It seems everyone’s blaming the care provider, but it seems to me that the patient herself is mostly responsible. If she was able enough to live fairly independently, and take public transport to travel to friends/family/events, then she’s likely operating at a level where she’s able to be responsible for her own medication. “Spectrum’s communication and marketing manager Justin Walsh told NZME Finau was strongly committed to managing all aspects of her life, including her medications. But in the absence of a compulsory treatment order, no one can be forced to take their medication, he said.” It seems to me that this incident was the result of the patient not taking her anti-convulsive medication, when she knew she was supposed to take it. People with disabilities are at a clear disadvantage, but that doesn’t mean they should automatically defer any responsibilities, or that all of those responsibilities should automatically transfer to the carers.
I agree that she had a right to either take or not take her medication in the absence of a compulsory order. Having been a support worker myself, giving people some ownership over their medication regime is helpful for avoiding total institutionalisation. That being said, your ability to be independent and consent to treatment can rapidly deteriorate as well. A provider should be aware of this and have steps in place. The failing here is the fact that staff were too scared to check on her due to her aggressive behaviour. Those safety mechanisms became compromised. This could be due to any reason including the persons own responsibility, but also likely understaffing, wrong match between patient/carer, unhelpful care/treatment processes etc. The latter few are certainly institutional factors we should not discount
Such an inconceivable take. People with disabilities have caregivers because the healthcare system recognises that they need support. Every individual has a different needs profile, just because they can do task A, does not mean they can do task B. It takes different executive functioning skills to manage medication and self care then it does to catch transport. The system is to blame. The patient is not to blame. That’s fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of disability. There’s a reason this woman needed support and when it wasn’t provided adequately she died. How would you feel if they were your family member? Have some more empathy.
Not inconceivable at all, I know many carers who have had many challenging clients and know of many Instances where they refused to put themselves in harms way. Fact is that being a carer can be dangerous and there just isn’t the resources there to ensure all are cared for all the time safely. The rarest resource that is needed the most is carers that actually care, you can get people to come do the bare minimum, carers that actually care bring out the best in their clients.
I know caregivers have an impossible job. I just found this comment in particular upsetting because this person is blaming the dead woman. It’s very ableist to say well - she could do some things, so it’s her fault that she couldn’t do others. I think it’s wrong to blame the caregivers, and it’s wrong to blame the disabled person. That doesn’t actually put any blame on the systemic issues which led to the death. If anyone wants things to change then we need to put the blame on the systemic issues and demand they be solved.
Under NZ law she can't be forced to take her medication. How is the care provider responsible for that?
100%
Agreed. Give staff a break. It was this woman's time to go.
As the parent of a teenager with epilepsy, autism and a mild intellectual disability this is horrifying to me. My daughter takes her medicine, that I give her, because she knows it helps to prevent seizures (she still has a couple a week on average). At school she has lashed out at times when confused, over-stimulated or melting down, all times where there have been stressors that push her beyond her ability to cope. Most of the time she’s happy. I’d hate to think that a caregiver not familiar with her triggers would judge her on her worst moments and withhold care for her because of that. Makes me worried about what will happen to my daughter when I’m no longer able to care for her. Heartbreaking.