Aged-care workers would be obliged to report physical and sexual abuse of elderly people under a new reporting regime agreed to today by federal and state ministers.

The requirements, which also make it mandatory to report suspected abuse, are among a raft of reforms aimed at restoring confidence in the aged-care sector following a series of nursing home abuse scandals. 

Police background checks on workers, and random inspections of aged-care facilities, are also part of the plan to help stamp out abuse of vulnerable elderly Australians. 

Federal Aged Care Minister Santo Santoro said authorities would quickly determine full details of the mandatory reporting scheme, and implement it as soon as possible. 

"(Under the new regime) if any instance of abuse is observed, or indeed suspected, it needs to be reported, compulsorily," Senator Santoro said. 
Both levels of government are now working to establish potential penalties for failing to report abuse. 

Senator Santoro, who met with state and territory aged care ministers today, said he remained sympathetic to proposals for a complaints commissioner or ombudsman. 

Today's meeting followed a series of abuse scandals involving elderly nursing home residents. 

In one of the worst cases, a 34-year-old Victorian nursing home worker has been charged with two counts of indecent assault and four of rape. 
Under the reforms, all aged care workers will have to undergo police background checks and all nursing homes will receive at least one unannounced random check a year. 
Further work is also being done on a whistleblower protection scheme. 
Victorian Aged Care Minister Gavin Jennings said that under the agreement, nursing home owners would be obliged to compulsorily report incidents to an appropriate authority. 
"That may be the police, that may be a complaints commissioner," he said. 
"But there are very, very clear guidelines, protocols and procedures in place to be sure that any incident is pursued with vigour." 
The federal Opposition's aged care spokeswoman Jan McLucas welcomed the plan for background checks, but said a more rigorous spot check program was meant to have been put in place six years ago. 

"(And) we need more detail on what sort of illegal activities would preclude somebody from working in an aged care facility, and how are the police going to be able to undertake these checks so we don't have understaffed aged care facilities," she said. 

However, the move to mandatory reporting for some types of abuse got a mixed reaction from the industry. 

Francis Sullivan, chief executive of Catholic Health Australia, which runs some 20,000 aged care beds, backed the plan. 

But he said the industry needed to learn from the experience of mandatory reporting in other sectors and come up with a rigorous and reliable system. 
Paul Sadler, chief executive officer of the Aged and Community Services Association of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, was less impressed, saying older people should be deemed legally competent to make their own decisions. 

"A mandatory system assumes, as it does for children in child protection, that everybody requires a legal guardian to take over their affairs," he said on ABC radio. 

"Where older people, for example because of dementia, do need that legal protection, then we have guardianship legislation that covers that." 
Health Services Union national secretary Craig Thomson said mandatory reporting should not be introduced without changes to protect whistleblowers.