Name: Maxine Griffiths (Witness No. 9)
Info: This is the account of Witness No. 9 who reported to the Board of Inquiry into the Royal Derwent Hospital and Millbrook Rise Hospital (Burkett Report), while being on a practical student placement. Witness No.9 went on to set up the first group home in Southern Tasmania which still operates today and caters for people with severe and multiple disabilities. These were dark times for the hospital but this wasn’t the first Board of Inquiry or the first Royal Commission, there were a number throughout the hospital’s history.
“I have heard about the Royal Derwent before I did go up there and I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to, you know, just work there to, well, and partly to see children that I had worked with when they were very young, and I was curious to how they would be a few years after” Maxine Griffiths.
One of the findings stated that the staff were “doing a good job in very difficult circumstances”