Rest home owners seek better standards

Press, 12 May 1984, Page 6

Rest home owners seek better standards

PA Auckland Rest home owners have launched a campaign to force all homes to improve their standards of care. The New Zealand Licensed Rest Homes Association announced that members had adopted a 19point code of practice. They are also setting up a disciplinary committee with power to fine members up to $lOOO or expel them from the association. The association’s president, Mr David Lines, said non-members should not think they could join the association and plug into its good name without bringing their homes up to standard. “As soon as they join they are vulnerable ... we only need a complaint about them and we will do them,” he said. About half the owners of private rest homes in Auckland belong to the association and Mr Lines said the association would accept new members even if they had a bad reputation. It would rather work on them from within the association than have them “out there giving us a bad name.” With more members the

association could afford to inspect members’ rest homes. The recent annual meeting of the association decided on a move that could lead to having an owner thrown out of business. If complaints to the association concern breaches of Health Department regulations and if the association thinks the complaints are justified it will pass the complaint on to the department, on whose approval owners depend if they are to stay in business. People complaining must put up $2O to have a complaint investigated. Mr Lines said this was to discourage malicious complaints. He agreed that a rest home resident with a wandering mind and no family or visitors would have a hard job to make a complaint stick. While Health Department regulations focus on plumbing, floor coverings, and the size of windows, Mr Lines said the association’s code of practice aimed at human care and tried to show members how to make residents comfortable in mind and body and reminded members of residents’ rights

to privacy and personal freedom, to their own property and own clothing. The code also tries to settle one persistent complaint: that the $lO-a-week pocket money the Social Welfare Department sends to rest home owners for each resident finishes up in the pockets of some owners. The new code advises members to keep a separate account for pocket money. A former president of the association, Mrs Joan Ransome, said nothing would stop complaints. A senile resident could flush the $lO down the lavatory and then complain about not being paid.