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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| What is elder abuse - who decides? | | Author(s) | Amber Selwood, Claudia Cooper, Gill Livingston |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 22, no 10, October 2007 |
| Pages | pp 1009-1012 |
| Source | http://www.interscience.wiley.com |
| Keywords | Elder abuse ; Attitude ; Informal care ; Dementia ; Paid welfare workers ; Social surveys. |
| Annotation | The hypothesis is tested that family and professional caregivers have different views about what constitutes elder abuse. A vignette was given to family and professional carers. They were asked to rate 13 management strategies for behavioural difficulties in a person with dementia on a Likert scale ranging from good idea to abusive. Some of the strategies were abusive according to the Department of Health (DH) 'No secrets' definition. Family carers were recruited as part of a study of Alzheimer's disease (AD): 74 family and 58 professional carers completed questionnaires. The only abusive strategy that significantly more professionals than family carers identified correctly was preventing someone moving by putting a table over their lap: 33 (86.8%) vs 35 (47%). In contrast, significantly more family carers identified that the neglect item of accepting someone was not clean was abusive: 21 (28.4%) vs 3 (7.9%). Professionals and carers reported significantly different views from each other and guidelines about what constituted elder abuse. This may be because abuse remains unacknowledged if people feel that there are no better management options, and reporting leads only to punitive action for the carer perhaps coupled with institutionalisation for the person with dementia. Successful guidelines require societal agreement about what constitutes abuse and that prevention leads to a better outcome. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-071113218 A |
| Classmark | QNT: DP: P6: EA: QP: 3F |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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