Category: Elder Abuse/Neglect

In observance of World Elder Abuse Day, the American Society on Aging is hosting a webinar, Coordinated Community Responses and Beyond: Collaborations to Address Crimes Against Older Adults. The session will be held June 14th at 10am PT. Free CEUs are available, but I am unclear what type of CEUs they are. From the site:

This web seminar will provide participants with practical tips on creating and maintaining a coordinated community response (CCR) to address issues of elder abuse and financial exploitation. Attendees will learn strategies to bridge common gaps seen between senior service providers, victim advocates at community-based organizations, and other partners involved in the response to survivors of abuse later in life. In addition to providing a blueprint for building comprehensive coalitions to address crimes against older adults in a holistic way, this presentation will offer tips on how to ensure the sustainability of a coordinated community response.

Register here.

Our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex is now available. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here. 

The National Indigenous Elder Justice Initiative has a Tribal Elder Protection Team Toolkit now available. “The Toolkit is designed to help you identify and implement a tribal elder protection team. The toolkit is made up of several sections. Each section contains information that concentrates on different aspects of developing a tribal elder protection team.” Obviously, since I’m posting it here, medical services are included in the team outline. You’ll find the following five sections:

• Section 1: Introduction
  An overview of elder protection teams and issues specific to tribal communities.
• Section 2: Developing a Tribal Elder Protection Team
  Learn about the benefits, how to get started, and barriers to service.
• Section 3: Developing Tribal Elder Abuse Codes
  The tribal elder abuse code allows the tribe to establish laws that protect elderly persons from abuse, neglect, and exploitation.
• Section 4: Team Members
  The team is made up of a coordinator, group of professionals, the elder, family members, and community members from diverse disciplines.
• Section 5: Cultural Sensitivity Resources
  Responding to elder abuse, interviewing elders, and tips for developing tribal relationships are discussed in this section.

You’ll also find some online education modules on their site, and while none of them are healthcare specific, I noted that healthcare is listed as one of the future topics, so continue to check back. Regardless, for those of you working with tribal communities, there is some solid, basic education available that is worth sharing with your team, particularly if they haven’t had much in the way of elder abuse education.

Our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex is now available. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here. 

The Elder Justice Initiative has a webinar coming up, MDT Member Recruitment and Retention: Building Trust and Traction. The session will be held February 22nd from 2-3pm ET. This isn’t a frequent topic of training, so consider attending (or listening at your leisure, since they are all archived). From the announcement:

Presented by Maro Casparian, Director of Consumer Protection at the Denver District Attorney’s Office; Linda Loflin Pettit, Manager of Community and Government Relations for the Prosecution and Code Enforcement Section for the City and County of Denver; and Sgt. T.J. Blair of the Denver Police Department, this webinar highlights real-world solutions from Denver’s Forensic Collaborative for At-Risk Adults, an elder abuse case review MDT.

Learning Objectives:
– Understanding the best practices for recruitment and ongoing engagement of team members.
– Exploring real-world examples of relationship- and trust-building strategies.
– Discovering new MDT Guide and Toolkit documents, including a recruitment letter and statement of need.

Register here.

Our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex is now available. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here. 

The National Center on Elder Abuse has a new research review out, spanning the past 3 years. You can download the PDF here. While the review doesn’t provide more than just the citations, it does break them down into categories, making it an excellent resource if you are trying to hunt down literature on a given subtopic.

The Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative is a treasure trove of resources on all things elder abuse, including a host of webinars, so many that I haven’t been able to keep up here. What follows is a selection of some of the many available (archived and live) on their site that are particularly relevant to our work. I have listed the live ones first, followed by a few archived selections:

Understanding Elder Mistreatment Through a Lens of Severity: Implications for Research and Practice (LIVE September 8th, 2pm ET): Please join our webinar on Friday, September 8, 2:00-3:00 p.m. e.t., as Sidney Stahl, PH.D., Research Consultant, Elder Justice Initiative, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., hosts a discussion with David Burnes, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Toronto, Canada. Dr. Burnes, a professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and Affiliate Scientist at Baycrest Health Sciences, introduced the concept of “severity” into the study of elder abuse. Severity of elder abuse may be an indicator of the urgency and types of help needed by victims of elder abuse. Yet, severity is an understudied aspect of the field, and Dr. Burnes has conducted several studies incorporating measures of severity. His research informs both targeted screening of victims, interventions that serve to help victims, and a forensic tool for possible use in the prosecution of elder abuse cases.

How EMTs Can Help Identify and Report Elder Abuse (LIVE September 11, 2pm ET): Details to come; please check back on the site.

The Forgotten Victims: Elder Homicides (LIVE September 25, 2pm ET): Details to come; please check back on the site.

Assessing Cognitive Capacity in Elder Abuse Cases (ARCHIVED): This webinar is offered to all professionals who work on elder abuse MDT’s to better understand the issue of decisional capacity. Dr. Olsen will provide several contexts where decisional capacity is central to case formulation and resolution. She will present the components of a good assessment with examples of how to collect and integrate relevant information. Lastly, the importance of maintaining a client-centered orientation will be discussed so that MDT’s maintain an awareness of the need to balance the client’s self-determination with the need for protection.

Improving Emergency Department Identification of Elder Abuse (ARCHIVED): Dr. Sidney M. Stahl, Research Consultant at the U.S. Department of Justice, hosts a discussion with Anthony Rosen, Instructor in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University, and Assistant Attending Physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY. Dr. Rosen is a practicing Emergency Physician and a researcher in elder abuse and geriatric injury prevention. Dr. Rosen and his team are doing groundbreaking research on distinguishing physical signs and forensic markers of elder abuse from injuries and bruising related to falls in older persons. Dr. Rosen will be discussing this, in addition to a standardized protocol for photographing geriatric injuries and comprehensive classification system for visible injuries. His interdisciplinary work with nursing, social work, geriatrics, psychiatry, and radiology has significant implications for the prosecution of elder abuse and neglect cases.

Assessing Cognitive Capacity in Elder Abuse Cases (ARCHIVED): Sidney Stahl, Ph.D., Consultant, Elder Justice Research Initiative, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC, hosts a discussion with Laura Mosqueda, M.D., FAAFP, AGSF, Chair, Department of Family Medicine, Professor of Family Medicine and Geriatrics, Associate Dean of Primary Care, at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, and Page Ulrey, J.D., Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney, King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, Seattle, WA. Dr. Mosqueda has completed some of the only forensic research in the context of elder abuse. She will share her findings with attendees and introduce a physician-friendly protocol for documenting physical abuse for prosecutors should the case go to trial. The webinar is being co-presented by Ms. Page Ulrey who will describe the value of the new protocol from a prosecutor’s perspective.

The National Center on Elder Abuse has a research-to-practice translation: Bruising in Older Adults: Accidental Bruising and Bruising from Physical Abuse (PDF) that I stumbled on, thanks to the magic of social media. The graphics-heavy piece makes a lovely companion to the overview on elder abuse screening tools (PDF) they published last year. And now you have a topic for your next staff meeting, with read-aheads ready to download and send out to your team.

NCALL has published an impressive multimedia toolkit, Working with Older Survivors of Abuse: A Framework for Advocates. DO NOT let the 2nd half of that title keep you from doing the deep dive into this resource–1.) there’s healthcare-specific information (although it’s briefer than I’d like); and 2.) seriously, I do not want to have to convince anyone that our colleagues in other disciplines have some wisdom to share with us. My very favorite part of all of this is the Summary Report with Captioned Videos (PDF), which provides links to video clips peppered throughout the document on discrete topics, like safety planning and mandatory reporting. There’s a lot to wade through (I haven’t finished going through the whole thing yet), but make the time. And share with your MDTs and SARTs, because there’s some community response/policy content that is worth the broader discussion. BTW, this is not just about elder abuse, but working with older survivors of many different crimes, so if you’re thinking to yourself, this doesn’t apply because we don’t do elder abuse in our program, you would be incorrect. This is a resource for any forensic clinician caring for older patients in their practice (so essentially anyone who doesn’t have a peds-specific program).

June 15th is World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. In light of this, allow me to point your attention to the dedicated NCJRS page that has a good selection of resources.

And from WHO:

Today is #WorldElderAbuseAwarenessDay.
1 in 6 older adults hv been abused in the past year. Recognize the different forms of #ElderAbuse pic.twitter.com/5aQc6udmC8

— WHO (@WHO) June 15, 2017

1 in 6 older ppl experience some form of #ElderAbuse, a figure higher than previously estimated https://t.co/qW4uDrr4lD pic.twitter.com/cpmDroqANC

— WHO (@WHO) June 15, 2017

All types of #ElderAbuse can have an impact on the health and wellbeing of the older person https://t.co/qW4uDrr4lD pic.twitter.com/NJU7GfOI8b

— WHO (@WHO) June 15, 2017

I get a lot of questions about program expansion, particularly related to 1.) education; and 2.) funding. Here’s a session that will address the latter, at least as it relates to elder abuse programming. OVW and the National Clearinghouse on Abuse in Later Life (NCALL) are hosting a webinar to discuss previous grantees in the Enhanced Training and Services to End Abuse in Later Life grant program and address the necessary steps to apply for these funds. It will be held June 15th, World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, at 2pm ET. From the announcement:

Each day, 10,000 baby boomers turn 65. As the number of older individuals in America increases, unfortunately so does the number of potential victims of elder abuse. Research indicates that one in ten older adults are abused and that two-thirds of elder abuse victims are women. This webinar on June 15 – World Elder Abuse Awareness Day (WEAAD) – will commemorate WEAAD 2017 and the efforts of communities and professional around the county to confront elder abuse. This webinar will also provide participants with a detailed overview of OVW’s Enhanced Training and Services to End Abuse in Later Life grant program. This grant program funds communities across the country to address elder abuse through trainings, services, and a coordinated community response. Participants will hear from previous years’ grantees about the impact the grant program has had on their community’s response to abuse in later life. Participants will also learn about steps they can take to prepare to apply for the grant.

Register for the webinar here.