Sarah Holland-Batt

I am okay.

I think I'm feeling really great at the moment because I feel like there's an end in sight.

I mean, it's been a pretty gruelling kind of few months of very little human interaction for me because I live alone.

So

I am looking forward to going to national parks and starting to get a little bit more fresh air other than in my immediate neighbourhood.

It sort of stems from my own father's experience in his aged care facility.

Dad moved into aged care in 2015.

He had had Parkinson's since 2000, since I was 18 was when he was diagnosed.

He'd had it for a really long time, about 15 years.

And he moved into his aged care home.

And pretty much immediately, I was really shocked at the state of the care that was being provided.

He was in a very good facility, in a reasonably expensive facility.

And so we had expected that the standard of care would be really good.

He had some pretty catastrophic experiences.

in his aged care facility, neglect, negligence, medication mismanagement and even an instance of deliberate abuse.

And so that galvanised me, of course, to try and seek some justice for him and to work out how this had happened.

And then I complained to the regulator and their response was manifestly inadequate.

And so then I started asking questions about the systemic kind of failures that I felt had contributed to what happened to Dad.

And the more I looked into it, the more alarming it became.

And because I'm a researcher by nature and, you know, you get the sense of something and you just keep digging and digging and digging, the more digging that I did, the more alarmed I became.