Dane Mitchell is Managing Director of Optimum Allied Health, which he started in a small gym in Yamba in 2013 and has grown to 85+ clinicians across six clinics in Northern NSW and South East Queensland, plus a national aged care physiotherapy network servicing more than 50 residential homes. He also sits on the Board of Directors at St Andrew’s Village Ballina, a not-for-profit provider, which gives him a governance view of the same funding rules he works under commercially. Dane co-hosts Time Well Spent with Rose Plater, a weekly podcast on aged care, the NDIS and health that passed 12,000 downloads in its first nine months and 80,000 YouTube views, with guests including Dr Nick Coatsworth and Inspector-General of Aged Care Natalie Siegel-Brown. He works daily across AN-ACC, Support at Home and CHSP, and argues the sector’s funding shortfall is a political choice rather than an accounting one.
Sex and Intimacy in Aged Care: Rights, Consent and SIRS
Time Well Spent is an aged care podcast hosted by Dane Mitchell and Rose Plater. This session is a live episode recorded on stage: a conversation between people who work in the sector, not a presentation with slides.
The topic is one most providers handle badly. Standard 1 of the strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards names intimacy, including sexual and gender expression, as something an older person has a right to. The same legislation requires providers to report unlawful sexual contact through the Serious Incident Response Scheme. Those two obligations meet in a corridor at eight at night, when a care worker opens a door and decides on the spot whether they have seen a relationship or an incident. Most have had no training for that moment.
They are joined by Mel Argent, Chief Executive Officer of Rockpool Residential Aged Care, who answers as a provider. The session works through real cases, not principles.
A couple living with advanced dementia who believed they were married, and what the home did: met both families, lowered the bed to reduce fall risk, put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. The hardest part was not the families. It was staff whose personal and religious beliefs sat against the residents’ rights.
A near-identical case where the home consulted and documented everything properly, and a family member still complained to the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission.
A behaviour support plan recording “new behaviour identified: resident observed masturbating” about a 74-year-old man, alone in his room with the door closed, whose privacy staff had interrupted by walking in without knocking.
That case leads to the question the session is built around. When a staff member walks in on two consenting residents and tells them they have done something wrong, where is the harm — in what the residents did, or in the shame that followed? The reporting scheme was written for abuse. Providers are applying it to relationships.
The podcast also covers consent when capacity fluctuates, recording a person’s wishes while they still can, what a substitute decision-maker can and cannot refuse, and why older buildings still make residents feel they need permission.
Extended audience questions follow, anonymously through Slido or on a roving microphone. Delegates leave with language for the conversation, a defensible position on consent and reporting, and a reason to reread their own behaviour support plans.