Across the USA, solitude has become a deadly threat for hundreds of thousands of senior citizens living at home.
Last
year alone, state adult protective services (APS) intervened in more
than 142,000 cases to protect seniors at risk from what is clumsily
termed “self-neglect” – seniors who have become too physically or
mentally incapacitated to care for themselves and have no other care
providers.
Overall, according to new federal data
obtained exclusively by the New England Center for Investigative
Reporting (NECIR), state-based APS agencies completed more than 713,000
investigations in fiscal year 2017. The agencies identified nearly
235,000 victims of abuse, including the self-neglect cases. About 10
percent of the total abuse victims counted were under age 50, because
some states include abuse or neglect of younger adults with
disabilities.
These numbers, part of an initial
attempt by the federal government to track maltreatment of seniors
nationwide, understate the scope of the problem, and probably
dramatically, according to the agencies compiling the data.
“The elder abuse data is not complete. It’s correct in
terms of what’s reported, but there are so many cases that aren’t
reported,” said Alice Page, an adult protective services and systems
developer with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
“We're
way behind in elder abuse reporting than, for example, in child abuse
reporting. It's just a different system. There's much more emphasis and
resources that have been put into child protective services than there
have been into elder abuse or abuse of adults. And so we're sort of
playing catch up.”
Elder abuse can range from
physical or sexual assault against vulnerable seniors to financial scams
to abandonment or neglect by caregivers. The most common threat is
self-neglect: an elderly person unable to provide for their own
clothing, shelter, food, medication or other basic needs, and having no
one to provide care for them. It is a problem that is growing as the
population ages.
States
have operated under a federal mandate to collect data on child abuse
for decades. There is no federal mandate to do the same for elder abuse
and neglect.
“We have often referred to elder abuse
as a silent issue. For decades people just didn't want to address it at
all,” said Edwin Walker, deputy assistant secretary for aging at the
Department of Health and Human Services, which is leading the effort to
build the national database.
“In the mid-1970s, the
federal government got in the business of charting out guidelines and
parameters for addressing child abuse. But the federal government never
did that for adult protective services or elder abuse.”
During
the past several years, the Administration for Community Living has
embarked on a voluntary effort with the cooperation of state APS
agencies to compile a national database of abuse of seniors living at
home. For the most part, abuse in nursing homes or other settings is
managed by other agencies and counted separately.
A state-by-state breakdown of the data provided to NECIR shows obvious holes in the data.
For
instance, the new totals do not include reports from six states – New
Mexico, Oregon, Nevada, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin – for a
variety of reasons.
West Virginia, for example,
does not collect statewide data on maltreatment of seniors, leaving it
to each county to keep their own tally. Wisconsin counts its data on a
calendar year, not a fiscal year, and thus has not been able to produce
reports for the time period the federal data system uses.
Oregon
sent its data in late and was not included in this year’s report.
Officials in Nevada and South Dakota said they have been gearing up to
provide data for the new federal reporting system called the National
Adult Maltreatment Reporting System (NAMRS) and expect to be included in
next year’s report.
There are other anomalies –
New York reported nearly 40,000 investigations of alleged abuse or
maltreatment in 2017, but the federal data indicate New York had zero
confirmed victims. That’s because New York’s law does not identify
victims; instead the state determines when there is a level of risk to a
senior that justifies the state providing services, which it did in
4,700 cases last year, according to the New York State Office of
Children and Family Services.
States all have
different standards for determining when abuse or neglect has occurred,
meaning the same set of evidence may qualify as a “substantiated” abuse
or neglect case in one state, but not in another. And the new report
acknowledges “no two states reported on all of the same data elements.”
Self-neglect challenges
Still,
experts in the field all agree that self-neglect is one of the most
challenging issues in elder protection, and it dominates the work of
Adult Protective Services units across the country.
“Self-neglect
appears to be a very serious problem in our society not a new problem.
But it is, as you've been picking up, approximately two thirds of the
cases reported by APS nationwide,” said Holly Ramsey-Klawsnik, director
of research for the National Adult Protective Services Association.
Ramsey-Klawsnik
cautioned that the prevalence of self-neglect in state case files does
not mean this is the most common form of adult maltreatment – only that
it is the one most readily identified. “Self-neglect cases are so much
more visible,” she said.
Neighbors or friends or
social workers can tell when a senior’s house has fallen into disrepair,
or an older person in the grocery store is unwashed or badly unkempt.
It may be harder to tell if a senior has had money stolen from them by a
caregiver or if they have been denied access to appropriate medical
treatment.
Self-neglect cases also come with the
underlying problem that adults are generally assumed to have autonomy
and control of their decision-making, so it is hard for a government
agency to know when to intervene, particularly if the elderly person
rejects assistance.
Some people “just refuse to
accept help for whatever reason,” said Cynthia Lien assistant professor
of medicine at New York’s Cornell Medical Center. But she says there is
also “a large population who just are incapable of giving up a coping
mechanisms or repeat behaviors that they've developed over years,” even
when those behaviors are no longer working.
“That
manifests in things like an unsafe home environment or hoarding
disorders or refusing to see a doctor because maybe they had a bad
interaction in the past with a physician and they just don't trust the
health system. “
And people have a right to not take proper care of themselves, adds Alice Page from Wisconsin.
“We
talk about the dignity of risk in these cases,” she said. “All of us,
there's risk to every decision we make, and some people just choose to
live with more risk and accept the consequences. And if you give people
choices that involve risk, that enhances dignity.”
But self-neglect is not simply an issue of risk for the senior individual making the poor decisions.
“We
do know that self-neglect increases illness, increases emergency room
use, increases hospitalization, increases nursing home use, increases
hospice use and hastens mortality,” said Ramsey-Klawsnik. “Self-neglect
is costing society a lot of money when they have to go to the E.R. and
have no money to pay for insurance.” People who self-neglect are also at
higher risk of other forms of abuse or exploitation.
Beyond
that, a senior in an apartment who is hoarding or failing to take out
the trash may be creating an unhealthy environment or a vermin problem
for everyone else in the building.
Still, states struggle with how to intervene.
“We
can't force somebody who's just making poor choices to do
something," said Kathy Morgan of Washington State’s Aging and Long-Term
Support Administration. “Although our investigators do a really great
job of talking with people and trying to assist them with services or
supports that may be able to put in place if they're willing to do
that."
State assistance in self-neglect cases can
range from referrals to Meals on Wheels or in-home care services to
cognitive assessments that could lead to assignment of a guardian if the
senior no longer has the capacity to make decisions on their own.
Soaring cases
While
the data in NAMRS is full of gaps and aberrations, what is clear is
that the number of abuse and neglect cases is soaring nationwide.
• Washington state had about 19,000 elder abuse reports in 2012 and 49,000 reports in 2017, Morgan said.
• Massachusetts confirmed 7,100 abuse and neglect cases in 2015 and 9,800 in 2017.
• Ohio reported about 16,200 reports of abuse, neglect and exploitation of seniors in 2017, up from about 13,150 in 2014.
• Pennsylvania officials investigated 13,000 abuse reports in fiscal year 2014 and nearly 18,000 in fiscal year 2016.
Part
of this increase is simply a function of better reporting systems in
the states, and more public awareness that elder abuse is a problem that
should be reported to authorities.
But part is
also because there are simply more seniors living in communities around
the country, as Americans live longer, remain in their homes longer, and
survive ailments that would have been fatal in prior decades.
“I
think elder abuse is more prevalent,” Morgan said. “As our population
continues to grow and is getting older – our 60 and older population,
we’re going to continue to see these types of numbers.”
Full Article & Source:
New data show hundreds of thousands of elder abuse cases even with huge reporting gaps
