Elder Abuse Identification by an Australian Health Service: A Five-Year, Social-Work Audit

Abstract

For hospitals and other health-care services, identifying older people experiencing abuse remains a challenge. Social workers at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne (SVHM) used a clinical data mining approach to retrospectively audit electronic medical records containing 466 episodes of care over a five-year period where elder abuse was identified based on a system of alerts. The findings highlight key characteristics of the vulnerable older persons, the perpetrators, their social contexts, and interventions undertaken, clarifying a range of vulnerability and risk factors in the sample. Half were aged 80 years and over; two thirds lived with the person of concern; two thirds were from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and a third had cognitive impairment. A high proportion were assessed as being at moderate to high levels of risk, requiring urgent to prompt intervention. Audit findings strengthened knowledge and led to improvements in elder abuse responses by social workers, which included policy development, training, risk management and safety planning processes, resourcing, and research initiatives. This paper describes how social workers engaged in data collection and analysis to inform their practice within a health-care setting and contributed to service evaluation and improvements.IMPLICATIONS This paper demonstrates how social workers can conceptualise and engage in research to better understand a social problem: in this case, it was responding to elder abuse, within a hospital setting.This paper highlights how social workers can use evidence from practitioner-driven research to inform practice and improve service outcomes for those they work with.