Jo Clifford worked as a mental health nurse at Wolston Park in the early 1980s. In this episode she retells her first hand allegations of the routine abuse of patients, of a 5 year old locked up in an adult mental health ward, an elderly patient ‘Ethel’ washed with a hose every day, the rape of an 80 year old female patient by a male head warden in a room where drugs were kept. She had the key. Jo reported the rape to the authorities at Wolston Park and had her tyres slashed as retaliation. The perpetrator was never held accountable.
That wasn’t the only time Jo says she was punished for speaking out about the mis-treatment of patients. Jo also remembers the smoking chimney from the ominous morgue. Only a Parliamentary Inquiry can investigate the travesties of human atrocity that beset the patients of Wolston Park Mental Hospital from the 1960s – 1980s.
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