A New Focus on Elder Abuse

 

excerpted from a story by Jane Gross

NY Times – April 23, 2010

 Tucked into the huge new health care law is a whopping $777 million, spread over the next four years, for programs to prevent and prosecute elder abuse. Advocates for these programs have been begging Congress for more money since 1978. Now they are celebrating as if they had won the lottery.

 The provision in the law are all but identical to those in the Elder Justice Act, which was championed by the National Center on Elder Abuse and its coalition partners for more than 30 years, through Congressional hearings and four failed attempts since 2002 despite bipartisan support to get the bill to the Senate floor.

 The act provides financing for 1,700 new investigators of elder abuse around the country, for state demonstration grants to test various new approaches to adult protective services, to support existing state ombudsmen and to train new ones to investigate complaints related to long-term care facilities, including assisted living facilities and nursing homes.

 The new law will also create a coordinating council to make further recommendations on preventing elder abuse to the federal secretary of Health and Human Services in a report due in two years.

 Separately within the health care package, another new federal law, the Patient Safety and Abuse Prevention Act, creates a national system of criminal background checks for those seeking employment in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

 Bank tellers, because of their regular contact with customers, are often the first to detect odd behavior in a client and changes in the usage pattern of their accounts, or to see that new participants are involved in an elderly client’s financial affairs. Mr. Snyder was among the initiators of one early pilot program in Philadelphia, at Wachovia banks, now owned by Wells Fargo. Research from the program showed that tellers were correct in seven out of 10 cases in which they thought something was amiss. Among the red flags were abrupt increases in credit or debit card activity, repetitive withdrawals over a short period of time or at odd hours, large withdrawals from previously inactive accounts, the addition of new authorized signers on accounts and statements sent to an address other than the vulnerable adult’s home.

 A division of the roundtable has recently revised its 2003 handbook for training purposes, which could be used by any bank that chose to try a ground-level approach to preventing financial abuse of the elderly.

 The same study also found that only one in 14 cases of elder abuse is reported, which could mean a real count of more than a half million financial abuse cases annually. It is estimated that the annual cost of financial abuse of elders to be $2.6 billion. By comparison, financing for these new programs is a bargain.