Residential aged care facilities

• Immunity for aged care providers will strip elders of legal rights

  25th Mar 2022

  A proposed amendment to the Aged Care Act that will protect aged care providers from civil claims and criminal charges arising from unlawful restraint incidents must not proceed, say lawyers.

• Aged care performance data must be made public

  20th Nov 2020

  Consumers need easy access to data about the performance of individual aged care facilities so that they can make informed decisions, says the Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA). 

• Budget 2020 failed to address the urgent and life-threatening issues in aged care

  7th Oct 2020

  The 2020 federal budget has failed to address the systemic problems in aged care that COVID-19 has tragically exposed, says the Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA).

• COVID-19 shows the cracks in our aged care system

  20th Aug 2020

  Catherine Henry questions why we are seeing so many COVID-19 deaths in aged care, and suggests that it's not just that older Australians are more vulnerable to the infectious disease. She believes that COVID-19 is, in many ways, just the next thing to expose the systemic problems in an aged care system that demands a major overhaul.

• Newmarch House coronial investigation welcomed

  4th Jun 2020

  A coronial investigation into the COVID-19 deaths at Newmarch House is welcome as it should provide the opportunity for much needed scrutiny of the issues that led to the tragedy, says the Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA).

• A spotlight on the Newmarch House tragedy: Where to next?

  14th May 2020

  In this article, Catherine Henry argues that the rampant, nationwide failures in governance, accountability, policy and the regulatory framework of aged care have been laid bare in the tragedy that has unfolded at Newmarch House. Catherine attributes these failures to the flawed Aged Care Act 1997 (Cth), whose provisions prefer the interests of providers over those of residents and their families. She calls for a dedicated inquiry into the Newmarch House tragedy and for the enactment of a new Aged Care Act which addresses the shortcomings of the current aged care system.