Madilynn

‘These organisations have the power to work with [the workplace safety regulator] to not support their staff who are trying to do the right thing, [but] rather support their staff who are helping them to cover up. And that for me has been a very difficult journey.’

Madilynn lives with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety after managing group homes for people with disability.

Madilynn told the Royal Commission she started her career two decades ago full of optimism.

‘I enjoyed it so much, and found a lot of reward and just happiness doing that kind of work ... It was my whole life.’

Madilynn volunteered with a large number of charities helping people with disability before getting a tertiary qualification.

‘I wanted to give back because I received a lot and enjoyed a lot of what all of those jobs brought to the table for me personally. So I wanted to, I guess, hone those skills.’

Just over a decade ago, she became the manager of a group home with poorly trained staff and residents newly arrived from an institution.

‘They had just been put out in the community with no choices as to who they get to live with, the type of people they might have things in common with or their capabilities or their interests. It was really a recipe for disaster.’

Not long after starting, Madilynn witnessed a violent assault. When she tried to intervene, she was beaten and thrown through a wall.

When she reported the incident, the service provider told her ‘it was an internal matter’. She was not to tell parents what was actually going on with their adult children.

The service provider transferred Madilynn to another home, where she again encountered poorly trained support workers and overmedicated residents.

One day, when Madilynn had a weekend off, support workers left residents unsupervised while another worker left the home in a car to buy cigarettes. One of the residents crawled out of the house onto the driveway. The returning support worker ran over him and the resident spent several weeks in hospital.

‘I was advised by management not to disclose any information to the family of [the resident] … around the suspected intoxication of the staff member who had run him over in the driveway.’

Another time, a support worker locked a resident in the bathroom because he was ‘very agitated by her vocalisation’.

When Madilynn made him open the door, she found the resident with her face bleeding and ‘a flannel stuffed down her throat’.

When she reported the incident, the service provider was ‘dismissive of what [Madilynn] was saying, and more interested in the impact that it would have on the service if those incidents were shared’.

Madilynn took leave.

‘I began not sleeping and having nightmares about what I had seen.’

Madilynn felt her managers were less interested in the welfare of the individuals in their care, and more interested in ‘dollars and cents, budgets, rostering, limited rostering’.

‘Everything that happened was horrific in its own right,’ Madilynn told the Royal Commission, ‘but then to be judged and questioned and have your character questioned and have [the workplace safety regulator] rain down on you and have [the service provider] take no action to make these people accountable … it leaves a person wondering what hope is there for people.’