Category: Elder Abuse/Neglect

From the Center of Excellence in Elder Abuse and Neglect:  Bruising in Older Adults–Accidental and Inflicted (LINK HAS BEEN FIXED). This podcast reviews two studies about bruising in the elderly and discusses the all important issue of using color to accurately age bruises.

Part of the work of the Center of Excellence is the Elder Abuse Forensic Center. To read about their finding, check out their report in The Gerontologist here. They also have published a PDF with links to images of physical markers of elder abuse, which you can access here.

USC Ageworks has an online tutorial on elder abuse and neglect. It’s a free course and may provide 2.5 CMEs for physicians (sorry, no nursing CEs available), but you’d need to check to see if that’s still an option (the expiration date has passed, but not everyone adheres hard and fast to those dates, and not everyone updates their sites with newer info). Either way, it specifically addresses some forensic issues, and couldn’t be easier to access.

Stanford School of Medicine has an interactive tutorial for improving communication with elderly patients from differing cultures. It’s free of charge and is specifically meant for clinicians. Using three scenarios/situations common to first contact with a patient, you will be given options from which to select an appropriate response. All information in the scenarios comes from either the patient’s medical chart, or from information you gather as you see the patient for this first visit. While few answers are wrong, one answer uses more cultural sensitivity and maintains issues related patient dignity more than others. Explanations with the answers will provide information related to each response. Additional information is provided in the Summary section.

Here’s a really interesting multimedia site on financial expoitation of the elderly: from Dallasnews.com, Mary Ellen’s Will: The Battle for 4949 Swiss. The site provides the viewer with the story of Mary Ellen Bendtsen and includes case details, transcripts from interviews and video footage. Pay special attention to notes in the right hand column of each section–they will guide you to  resources and information related to financial exploitation and other issues discussed in the story. Even the viewer feedback is fascinating on this site…

Nurse.com is offering 1 CEU for their offering Elder Abuse: Mistreatment of Older Americans on the Rise. Cost of the course is $10 and is in the standard article-posttest format.

From the Center of Excellence in Elder Abuse and Neglect: Caregivers, People with Dementia and Elder Abuse. This podcast “discusses recent research at UC Irvine on dyads of people with dementia and their caregivers. Did abuse commonly occur? What are the strongest predictors of abuse?”

Dr. Laura Mosqueda, Director of Geriatrics and Professor of Family Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, is a leader in the area of clinical identification and response to elder abuse. She is a frequent lecturer on the topic and I have personally been very impressed with both her presentations and publications (particularly her work on bruising in the elderly).