Katina

‘When you listen to your clients cry and you hold them in the night, when they’re telling you their concerns and there’s nothing you can do, it’s heartbreaking.’

Katina worked as a support worker, coordinator and team leader in several group homes for 20 years. She told the Royal Commission the organisation that ran the homes refused to deal with serious issues.

Domestic violence was a common problem because management didn’t care if the residents were compatible. ‘It’s just fill that bed … that’s the goal,’ Katina said.

Whenever she reported domestic violence management would tell her to ‘downgrade the incident, the incident did not occur’.

On one occasion one of the male residents sexually assaulted a female resident. Management told Katina to ring the woman’s mother and ask her to drop the intervention order so the man could continue to live in the house. Katina refused.

Another time, a male support worker ‘formed a fond liking’ for a female resident. Katina didn’t think it was appropriate for the worker to continue to deliver the woman’s personal care and asked management to move the worker to a different facility. Katina was told she was being over protective.

The worst case of management neglect was when she was working as team leader in a house with five young adults and one older man. All were autistic and non-verbal and, except for the older man, could be violent.

When Katina arrived she couldn’t find any documentation for the clients, just a few out-of-date behaviour support plans.

She soon discovered the house was ‘blacklisted’ by all medical services in the area. ‘I couldn’t get anybody to work with these people.’

The older man was the victim of regular sustained abuse by other residents. He would be thrown to the floor, his head trampled until he was bleeding all over. Katina reported the abuse and classed it as domestic violence but management asked her to downgrade it so it fell into another category.

The older man was eventually able to leave the home and management accepted a new client. This new client required two-to-one support at all times, which was impossible as only two staff were rostered on at any one time.

Katina couldn’t understand why the new client was in a house with five other people when he had a well-funded NDIS package to enable him to live alone. She later learnt the provider not only received the NDIS funding, but the state government paid an additional $1.2 million to the provider to place this young man somewhere.

Katina contacted the state government and advocacy groups. ‘I said to them somebody has to act for this man because putting him in a group home not only threatens him but threatens everybody else that lives in this home.’ She told them it was also a danger to staff.

Katina asked the behavioural support manager to provide safety training for the staff and requested protective sleeving to keep their arms safe from attacks. Management refused.

One night Katina stopped by the house on her way home to drop off some training materials that might assist the staff. She knocked on the staffroom door and when she didn’t get a response used the security code to enter the house.

One of the workers, a big tall man, was covered in blood from head to toe. ‘He was standing in the room crying at me saying, “I don’t know what to do – what am I doing here? What does this company do to us?”’

The other support worker was looking after two other clients who were bleeding. Katina took the injured worker into the staffroom to assess his injuries and ring an ambulance. The offending client managed to get into the office and attacked Katina. At one stage he held her in the doorway by her neck.

‘If I didn’t have my male workers I probably wouldn’t be here to tell you this story but that client should never have been placed in that home.’

Katina carries physical and emotional scars from that day. She now needs to work in a quiet environment where she won’t be startled and says she ‘will never work in disability services ever again’.

‘I have 20 years of knowledge that will never be put back into [the sector] … There are so many workers like me who wear their heart on their sleeve, that do it because you know, they have an empathy and … you fall in love with these people that you work with.’