Development and Implementation of a Coordinated Community Response to Address Elder Abuse and Neglect.

BACKGROUND: Elder abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation impacts over five million community-dwelling older adults in the United States. Although services are available to help these victims, they are often fragmented within communities with service providers having limited means to provide preventative services. The coordinated community response (CCR) is a type of coalition intended to overcome siloed services through a single-point-of-entry system and more team-based approaches to prevention. This article describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of the interagency functioning of a local CCR. METHODS: The main goal of the CCR has been to better serve victims of elder abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation. However, through the coalition's evolution, the mission of how to do this shifted from a victim service model to a prevention approach. Unique features of this CCR include a uniform consent form to allow sharing of protected client data among all service providers and a technology-supported infrastructure for service record documentation and referrals. EVALUATION: Using available data from administrative records, the number of unique interagency referrals for services to older adults at risk increased 450% from 2016 to 2018. The strength and type of connections between agencies changed over time. Among all eligible clients offered services, most (77%) agreed to provide uniform consent to allow data sharing among other local partner agencies. DISCUSSION: The evaluation showed that the coalition met most of its planned measurable outputs in the original logic model guiding the CCR programmatic development. The evaluation findings and lessons learned inform updated guidelines for self-assessment of CCRs.

The Lichtenberg Financial Decision Screening Scale (LFDSS): A new tool for assessing financial decision making and preventing financial exploitation.

One of the challenges in preventing the financial exploitation of older adults is that neither criminal justice nor noncriminal justice professionals are equipped to detect capacity deficits. Because decision-making capacity is a cornerstone assessment in cases of financial exploitation, effective instruments for measuring this capacity are essential. We introduce a new screening scale for financial decision making that can be administered to older adults. To explore the scale's implementation and assess construct validity, we conducted a pilot study of 29 older adults seen by APS (Adult Protective Services) workers and 79 seen by other professionals. Case examples are included.