“Factory Farming Of The Elderly”
The OIO has approved BUPA Retirement Villages Limited (United Kingdom 100%) buying cross-lease interests in villas 1-10 and villas 12-28 at BUPA Remuera Retirement Village, 10 Gerard Way, Saint Johns, Auckland, from various individual private owners. The price was $26 million (but comes with an explanation: “The consideration reflects the current Auckland Council capital valuations. The villas are anticipated to be purchased between 2024 and 2034. The future market values and purchase prices are currently unknown”).
“The Applicant is a retirement village operator which is an indirect subsidiary of the British United Provident Association Limited. The Applicant seeks consent to acquire up to 27 villas at BUPA Remuera Retirement Village. The villas are currently individually owned and occupied by retirement village residents. The Applicant may buy the villas, as they come to the market, to address outstanding long-term maintenance of the villas and to streamline management of the villas with its operation of the wider retirement village. Consent was granted to this investment as the Applicant met the investor test criterion and the investment is likely to benefit New Zealand”.
BUPA is no stranger to controversy in New Zealand. In January 2024, Consumer reported that the family of a resident who had moved out was still being charged $183 per week in fees, despite its Website saying that fees would be terminated once the resident’s contract was terminated. But BUPA told the family that their relative’s contract allowed BUPA to charge fees even after the contract was terminated, so that’s what it was doing. That sounds like a nice little earner! https://www.consumer.org.nz/articles/bupa-retirement-village-risks-misleading-residents-about-weekly-fees
This is from 2017. “A man who won a case in the Disputes Tribunal against BUPA Care Services for its neglect of his elderly mother has hit out at claims it apologised to him. Robert Love says BUPA, the owner of St Kilda Care Home where his 92-year-old mother Freda Love was regularly left in urine-soaked bed linen, has not apologised to him as it claimed last week”.
“Love won a Disputes Tribunal case against BUPA Care Services which was ordered to pay him $10,000 for failing to deliver reasonable standards of care. The Tribunal found BUPA breached its contract with Love as well as the Consumer Guarantees Act and the Fair Trading Act. Freda Love, who could not walk but otherwise enjoyed robust health, soiled herself when she was left unattended and waiting for almost three hours to go to the toilet”.
“On another occasion she was found by her son shivering under a thin blanket in a urine-soaked bed with the window open and the call bell out of reach. She also sweltered in a room that reached 30C in summer because of inadequate design, and had a sticking plaster put across raw skin on her buttocks.
In January (2017) Love removed his mother from the home after five months of assurances by BUPA that St Kilda staff would do better”.
“‘During this relatively short period she endured multiple occurrences of neglect, failure to provide the necessities of life, long delays in the provision of care along with incompetent and distressing treatment’, Love said in an open letter. ‘It was a devastating experience’. Freda Love died in Waikato Hospital in February (2017) and the case prompted Consumer NZ to call for an independent inquiry into rest homes.
“Following the Tribunal decision, BUPA issued a statement saying it regretted the incident, has apologised to the Love family and was working on better practices and policies. He said making matters worse New Zealand Aged Care Association chief executive Simon Wallace repeated the information. ‘My family have not received an apology from BUPA. BUPA have not written to me with any formal or informal apology. If the BUPA statement is referring to the four letters BUPA wrote in response to my complaints last year, these are not what can be considered an apology’”.
“On top of that he said BUPA last wrote to him on April 21 this year (2017) to inform him there would be a delay in responding to his complaint while an investigation was conducted. ‘I am still waiting’. Love believes there should be an inquiry into rest homes and said there would have been no consequence for BUPA if he had not taken a case to the Tribunal”.
“He said it did not seem to have learned anything from his mother’s ordeal. When questioned about an apology a BUPA spokeswoman said the company had nothing further to add to the Love case” (NZ Herald, 15/11/17) https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/bupa-never-apologised-son-of-neglected-rest-home-resident/TPF37UX63OVJDBGQNAVLSJVGCM/ And these are only a couple of the most recent examples.
Roger Award Runner Up
And BUPA made it to that absolute pantheon of corporate villainy, namely the Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa New Zealand. It was runner up in 2010. Here’s an extract from the Judges’ Report, which was sub-headed “Couldn’t Care Less”: “Staff are generally poorly paid, and frequently overworked, due to short staffing in their facility…”
“In these staffing circumstances, is it any wonder that the quality of client care is extremely variable, and that there are now many well-documented cases of elderly New Zealanders receiving poor care, or being so badly neglected or mistreated that they end up in a public hospital requiring acute care – where some of them die”.
“One of these people was a resident in a BUPA rest home in Tauranga. For several months she suffered considerably from misdiagnosed and untreated scabies. This led to other complications which eventually killed her….BUPA should be ashamed of itself, but it is only doing what all profit-seeking companies will do if Governments let them, which is to put profits before people” http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Roger/Roger2010.pdf.
The person who nominated BUPA was one of their own residents and she deserves to be immortalised – Rosa Oliver was an indomitable old bugger. I visited her in her Blenheim BUPA home when she was 89 and she didn’t mince words in her nomination, referring to “factory farming of the elderly”. She also nominated them because of the way they exploited the staff and paid such a pittance in wages (Rosa died in 2012).
The full August 2024 Decisions are at
https://www.linz.govt.nz/our-work/overseas-investment-regulation/decisions