16 April 2021
An inquest into the death of murdered Outback nurse Gayle Woodford has recommended serious repeat offenders be banned from South Australia’s AYP Lands and that police should be stationed in the Far North town of Fregon.
Deputy State Coroner Anthony Schapel said it was “perverse” that such a lawless town had no permanent police presence.
He also recommended that Mrs Woodford’s employer, Nganampa Health Council, “establishes processes to ensure that its health practitioners are accompanied by a responsible person en route on any callout regardless of the time of day or night’’.
Also among the 12 recommendations was that SA Police, the Parole Board and the Department of Correctional Services be obliged to advise whether an application should be made to detain a prisoner for longer periods.
The Deputy Coroner found Mrs Woodford’s death could have been prevented had the NHC made “provision for nurses to be accompanied by another person when working on-call at night and to have called for the necessary funding, a measure that took Mrs Woodford’s murder to come to realisation”.
Gayle Woodford was lured from the property she shared with her husband Keith in the small Outback community of Fregon, in March, 2016, by convicted sex offender Dudley Davey. Davey had claimed that his grandmother needed medical assistance.
The body of the 56-year-old mother was found two days later on the outskirts of Fregon, 200km south of the Northern Territory-South Australian border.
Mrs Woodford had been working as a nurse for the NHC and was on-call the night she was murdered. Davey, who had a long history of violent and sexual offending, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder, with a non-parole period of 32 years.
The circumstances surrounding Gayle’s death sparked what would become a three-year crusade by her family for laws to ban single-nurse postings in remote areas - a cause also championed by the ANMF (SA Branch).
Gayle’s Law – which protects health care professionals working in remote areas from attending after-hours emergency callouts alone – finally became fully operational after it was passed by the State Government in November 2019.
Speaking after the inquest findings, ANMF (SA Branch) CEO/Secretary Adj Associate Professor Elizabeth Dabars said: “I really do want to say at the outset that we absolutely owe a debt of gratitude to the Woodford family who’ve been absolutely amazing during this terrible time and advocating for the nursing professions in terms of protection and security.
“These recommendations are useful and they are important and we’re very pleased to see not only that it seems the coroner’s findings support the law (Gayle’s Law) but also support an expansion of it (that nurses are accompanied at any time),’’ Ms Dabars said.
“I think what we really want to see is two things. One is that the law should be actually extended beyond the jurisdiction of South Australia. I know that is not within the coroner’s gift to give but we’re hoping that these findings create an environment where we can reactivate that debate and get action on it.
“I think the other issue here is that this should not have occurred in the first place. What it does highlight is failures in the existing occupational health, safety and welfare system, which we see elsewhere.
“We see that both in rural and remote communities, but we see that in larger country and metropolitan hospitals where we believe that there is an absolute obligation on the employer to proactively and preventatively act in order to make sure violence and aggression and these issues are eliminated - but the system doesn’t appear to support that.
“We are seeing issues across the board in country and metropolitan areas where violence and aggression is a daily occurrence and it just quite frankly shouldn’t be,’’ Ms Dabars said.
“We want to see more action in terms of violence and aggression being eliminated, prevention being the state of the game rather than reactive and often sluggish reactions to problems that have already occurred.
“As recently as the last couple of weeks I spoke to the Minister directly (Health Minister Stephen Wade) and said the issues of violence and aggression that we see and the failure to act on it, we believe that the Government and the Department are culpable in that regard.
“What we want to see is employers actually being made to comply with their requirements and their requirements absolutely are to provide their employees with safe systems of work and a safe work environment.’’
Ms Dabars said there simply must be the political will to implement the coroner’s recommendations and also to provide safe systems of work.
“What I find absolutely gobsmacking is in an environment where politicians are saying that women in particular - and the nursing and midwifery professions are predominantly female dominated – they’re saying at every turn we should be encouraged to speak out against abuse,’’ she said.
“Yet at the same time they’re sending their own employees into environments which are unsuitable and inappropriate and subject to violence.
“And I think that is just an outrage and shameful.’’