‘I hope it was a wake-up call’: Welfare service honoured for intervention at Hambleton House
Months into the pandemic, Jane Barnes, the chief of staff of Wintringham, Australia’s largest aged care provider for the homeless, received an unusual phone call.
There had been an outbreak of COVID-19 at Hambleton House, a home in Albert Park for people living with disabilities and mental illness, and all the residents had been evacuated.
Jane Barnes won the lifetime achievement award at the 2021 Victorian Homelessness Achievement Awards.Credit:Scott McNaughton
The Department of Health and Human Services had found an unlikely temporary home for them – a backpacker hostel in St Kilda – and urgently needed an organisation to take on their care.
Ms Barnes – who last week won the Beth Thomson lifetime achievement award at the 2021 Victorian Homelessness Achievement Awards – is not afraid of a challenge.
In the 1990s she was employed by the Salvation Army to shut down the notorious Gill Memorial Hostel – described by former governor-general Sir William Deane as one of the worst men’s shelters in the country – and completely rethink crisis accommodation for the homeless.
After receiving the phone call in August 2020, Ms Barnes agreed to have a look at Base Backpackers.
“We walked through the front door and the first thing we saw was the vending machine with all the sex toys, and then there was the jelly blow-up pool and the pole dancing poles,” she said, laughing. “My eyebrows were up, and then we met these wonderful people.”
Ms Barnes said she would never have believed that a group of young people who ran a backpacker hostel would have been so adept at working with traumatised older people with challenging behaviour.
“Obviously, working with backpackers prepares you for just about anything because they were fabulous with the client group,” she said. “Nothing was too much trouble, nothing was shocking; they were just brilliant.”
When state Health Department officials investigated Hambleton House after the COVID-19 outbreak, they found uncapped needles, mattresses stained with bodily fluids, broken windows and spoilt food.
Wintringham and the staff at The Base, as it became colloquially known, looked after the former residents for three months until they could find them suitable long-term accommodation.
Residents being evacuated from Hambleton House following a COVID outbreak in August 2020.Credit:Chris Hopkins
“They were traumatised, they were sick,” Ms Barnes said. “It was scary the experience those people had and how vulnerable they were.”
Wintringham was a joint-winner at the 2021 Victorian Homelessness Achievement Awards in the excellence in ending homelessness among adults category for its work looking after the former Hambleton House residents at The Base.
Ms Barnes hopes that what happened at Hambleton House – one of more than 100 supported residential services in Victoria – will be a wake-up call for the state regulator, the department and health providers. Standards vary greatly at the homes, but the government has long been warned of abuse, neglect and even violence in the sector.
“We saw such a level of neglect in those people,” Ms Barnes said.
“Time and time again, we heard stories of people working in the field or health services saying there was nothing we could do, we just gave up, and that’s what I hope changes.”
Ms Barnes said she did not want to see supported residential services closed because there was often nowhere else for residents to go.
“We want to see better support, better funds going in there, better regulation that has got some teeth to it.”
She hopes the Hambleton House saga is also a wake-up call for the National Disability Insurance Agency, amid concerns the NDIS has led to the potential for conflicts of interest, rorting and exploitation in supported residential services.
The Victorian Public Advocate and Mental Health Legal Centre have both raised concerns with federal and state authorities that some supported residential services proprietors may be “double-dipping” – using residents’ NDIS funding to pay for services already covered by room and board fees.
“One of the most wonderful underpinnings of the NDIS is that people with disability have choice and control, and residents at some SRSs [supported residential services] have no choice and control,” Ms Barnes said.
Council to Homeless Persons chief executive Jenny Smith said Ms Barnes had been at the forefront of transforming dehumanising and dangerous night shelters into a model of safe and supported crisis accommodation.
“She’s worked on the front line delivering direct support, as a senior service manager, and as a policymaker in government,” Ms Smith said.
Ms Barnes said one of her proudest moments was closing the doors on the Gill Memorial Hostel – which had dormitories with 50 beds – and opening Flagstaff, a pioneering model of crisis accommodation.
The Gill Memorial Home for Men
Flagstaff had 64 rooms, each with an ensuite, and social work and allied health support on site. “People could come and go 24/7; we really worked hard to minimise the rules,” Ms Barnes said.
When she worked at the Gill, she met Archie, an Aboriginal man who was a member of the stolen generations, and had been in and out of institutions and prisons his whole life.
“He was a well-known face in the homelessness sector,” she said.
Ms Barnes kept in contact over the years, offering assistance when he wanted it, and eventually arranged for him to move into the James Barker Aged Care Centre in Footscray, which is run by the Salvation Army.
“He died of a heart attack in front of the television. It still makes me cry because I think that we made a difference for Archie,” Ms Barnes said.
“For someone who had had such a horrific life to die in such a peaceful way makes it all worth it. I want everybody to have the opportunity that Archie had, that we can make it possible for people to grow old.”
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