By law, doctors are required to report suspected elder abuse in their patients. However, most of them never do, even if they believe that silence may subject the elderly person to continued abuse at the hands of a caregiver. The lack of physician reporting is a huge problem, experts say, because as the elderly population continues to grow and doctors become ever more pressed for time in meeting the demands for care, more elder abuse will go undetected.
Every year, roughly 2.1 million elderly Americans are victims of some form of abuse, but Congress says the actual number could be closer to 5 million. According to medical and legal experts, doctors report just 2 percent of the elder abuse and neglect cases recorded each year by state protective service agencies. In Rhode Island for example, law requires anyone who believes that an elderly person is being abused, exploited, neglected or abandoned to make an immediate report to the state Department of Elderly Affairs (DEA). However, according to Corinne Calise Russo, director of the DEA, very few of the 800 to 900 abuse and neglect complaints filed each year with her office are made by physicians.
One of the main reasons for non-reporting by physicians is that they do not know how to recognize signs of elder abuse. Many physicians have not been taught through their medical training on how to properly notice if one of their patients has fallen victim of abuse. “Sometimes physicians don’t know what they’re looking at because, historically, there has not been education on elder abuse provided in medical training,” says one expert. “There are relatively few medical schools that have any specialized geriatrics training and there are relatively few geriatricians.”
To correct this problem, experts believe that more needs to be done to teach physicians about how to recognize the signs of elder abuse. According to Brown University’s Richard Besdine, who has trained more than 90 doctors for careers in geriatrics, “Doctors need to become better educated when dealing with elderly patients, to recognize that the bruises they see on an elderly person might not be from rolling over in bed. Most of the abuse occurs in the process of giving care to needy, frail older people who are not easy to take care of.”
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