Dr Nick Coatsworth: “We Never Asked Older Australians What They Wanted.” COVID, Regulation and the Consequences We’re Still Living With

We spent two years trying to protect older Australians. But did anyone actually ask them what they wanted? During COVID, aged care became one of the most tightly controlled environments in the country. Residents were isolated, families were locked out and providers were making big decisions without any solid evidence. We’re sure you don’t need to be reminded how that played out. Today Dane and Rose are talking with someone who is in the system currently with his mum going through the aged care funding packages as we speak - the Former Commonwealth Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Nick Coatsworth. Nick is reflecting not only on what those decisions looked like in real time, but what we got wrong, and why some of the hardest questions still haven’t been answered. Including: If another pandemic hit tomorrow, would anything change? Key moments: 0:00 - How a hospital doctor becomes the public face of Australia’s pandemic response 6:03 - What the government got wrong when it came to isolating aged care residents 9:18 - Who should have been making the calls during the pandemic and whether aged care providers were left to carry too much of that burden? 13:28 - The lingering impact of COVID on how the sector now thinks about risk, safety and infection control 18:41 - Is a lack of honest conversations with the public a recurring theme? 26:23 - The statistic that changes how you look at COVID in aged care and what it actually tells us about how residents live and die 37:51 - If another pandemic hit tomorrow, would we be prepared? Would there still be mandates? 43:43 - Why don’t we ever seem to learn from previous mistakes? 50:02 - The conversations most families avoid and why they matter more than anything else when it comes to end-of-life care  57:01 - What made Nick publicly push back on the misinformation bill and what that reveals about trust and control 59:53 -  How badly did COVID damage our trust in institutions? Did it just expose where it was already breaking down? 1:02:03- The one question we didn’t ask during COVID that should shape every future response