The phone call nobody expects
The facility manager rings, awkwardly. Your father spends his days with another resident. They hold hands, they go into the same room, someone saw something. Your mother died two years ago — or worse, she is alive and living at home.
The instinct is to ask the home to keep them apart. That is an understandable reaction. But before you ask, it is worth knowing what can actually be decided, because the answer is narrower than most families assume.
Where this starts: it is his life
Australian aged care is built around a Statement of Rights that every approved provider must uphold — including the right to be treated with dignity and respect, to have identity, culture and personal relationships respected, to privacy, and to exercise control over one's own life. A residential aged care home is a residence, not a supervised program, and it is not there to run residents' private lives for the convenience of their families.
And the point families most often get wrong: an enduring power of attorney or enduring guardianship does not let you consent to, or refuse, intimacy on your father's behalf. Those instruments cover financial, personal and medical decisions. Even a guardianship order made by a state tribunal does not extend to consenting to a sexual relationship for another adult — nobody holds that power for someone else.
So the framework is not "is this in his best interests?" The framework is whether he has capacity to make this decision himself.
The question that matters: does he have capacity?
Capacity is decision-specific and it fluctuates. It is assessed for this decision, now — not deduced from a diagnosis. Someone with early dementia may no longer manage a bank account and still recognise a person, seek them out, and show consistent pleasure and consistent reluctance across days. Someone further along may mistake the other person for a spouse, not recall the encounter an hour later, or show fear.
Ask the facility manager, in writing:
- Has capacity been assessed for this specific decision, by whom, and on what date?
- Is his behaviour consistent across days, or is this disorientation?
- Are there signs of distress in either resident — fear, tearfulness, withdrawal, changes in sleep or appetite?
- What has been documented, and what has been discussed with the other resident's representative?
- Has this been assessed against the incident reporting obligations, and if not, on what basis?
If either resident lacks capacity to consent, this stops being a privacy question and becomes a reportable incident. Unlawful sexual contact and inappropriate sexual conduct are explicitly within the Serious Incident Response Scheme, which obliges providers to record, act and notify the Commission within set timeframes. That obligation belongs to the provider and is not something a family waives.
What the home should do — and what it should not
Should: assess capacity clinically rather than morally; keep both residents safe; involve representatives where there is risk or a decision to be made; document; address it in the care plan; and respect the privacy of a resident who is not at risk.
Should not: treat it as a discipline problem. The wrong responses are recognisable — moving one resident without explanation, punitive supervision, and above all starting a sedative to "settle him". A psychotropic used to influence behaviour rather than to treat a diagnosed condition is a chemical restraint — a restrictive practice requiring last-resort justification, informed consent from the restrictive practices substitute decision-maker, documentation and review. It is not a way to resolve a family's discomfort.
So ask that question too: "Has any medication been changed since this was raised, and where is the behaviour support plan?" It is uncomfortable and it is the one to ask.
If your mother is still living
This is the most painful version and it has no technical fix. The home is not a moral guardian and cannot be directed to enforce fidelity.
What you can ask for is concrete and limited: that your mother is not exposed to it during visits, that time together happens in private space rather than a common area, and that nobody relays it to her in a corridor. That is a request about privacy and scheduling, and decent homes accommodate it.
On the rest, clinicians working in dementia care say the same thing consistently: in advanced dementia a new attachment is almost never a choice against someone. It is the need for a familiar presence in a world that has stopped making sense.
What to do as a family
- Agree a position among siblings before you call the home. Four relatives making contradictory demands paralyses any manager.
- Separate what hurts you from what harms him. They are different, and only the second is a reason to intervene.
- Ask for a care plan review for the decisions that can be made — room arrangements, how visits are handled, supervision where there is genuine risk.
- Put requests in writing, so they survive a change of manager.
When the home is the problem
If the response was to separate them by authority, move your father with no explanation, or sedate him, you have learned something about the home rather than about the situation. A place that handles a relationship between two older people this way handles everything else the same way.
Your routes are the provider's complaints process in writing, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, and the Older Persons Advocacy Network — free, independent, and notably an advocate for what the resident wants rather than what the family wants. If the dispute is about who decides, that belongs to your state or territory tribunal, not to the home.
And if you have concluded you want a different home and do not have another round of calls in you, that is the part we do. Tell us the area, your parent's needs and what went wrong here, and you get a shortlist worth calling, for A$109. If you don't receive at least 3 homes matching the area and criteria you gave us, we refund you in full. Start here
This article is general information for families, not legal or medical advice. Capacity assessment is for the treating clinicians, and guardianship and reporting rules differ by state and territory. If you believe a resident is at risk of harm, contact the facility manager and the Commission without delay. Curalune does not allocate beds and does not guarantee availability.