Mel Argent is Chief Executive Officer of Rockpool Residential Aged Care. She brings the provider’s view to this conversation, including her own reckoning with it: Rockpool takes pride in its practice, and Mel is candid that the organisation had assumed staff knew how to handle intimacy without ever training them for it. She speaks to what mandatory training crowds out, why teams still log consensual intimacy as a serious incident, and what it costs a resident when a well-meaning staff member gets it wrong. Mel has worked through the operational reality of this — the family meetings, the complaints, the staff whose personal or religious values sit against the resident’s rights — and she is prepared to say publicly what most chief executives will only say privately.
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.