WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS

Written Assignments

Written Assignments

Background and Significance

Maltreatment of older adults is a serious and underrecognized problem. Every state have enacted legislation to protect vulnerable older adults from abuse, and many require that mental health professionals report disclosures of abuse to authorities. The second half of the twentieth century has seen an explosion of public concern about maltreatment of vulnerable members of society. One consequence of this concern has been the enactment of many state and federal laws aimed at protecting vulnerable individuals from maltreatment. Child abuse and neglect laws are the most widely known segment of this category (Melton et al., 1995), but elder abuse laws have proliferated almost as rapidly (Wolf, 1997). Even though 45 states have enacted legislation requiring professionals to report elder maltreatment to authorities, these laws have neither achieved the same level of public awareness as child abuse laws. The purpose of this study is to provide an opportunity to demonstrate ability to use a theory-driven approach to study a health-related phenomenon amenable to nursing intervention.

The population of Americans over the age of 65 has grown twice as fast as all other age groups. Projections suggest that by the year 2050 one in five Americans will be over the age of 65. In that same period, the population of people over the age of 85 will increase by 400%, rising from its current level of 1% of the population to 5% of the population. Canada expects a similar shift in population (Hornick, McDonald, & Robertson, 1992). Improvements in the standard of living, the quality of public health services, and the availability of excellent medical care are at the source of this increased life span. Most of these older adults are healthy and live independently. In fact, people between the ages of 65 and 74 experience debilitating illness almost as infrequently as those a decade or two younger. The risk of disorders and diseases that compromise functioning steadily increases, however, in each decade after the age of 75. Cognitive impairment occurs frequently at this stage of life. The Harvard Mental Health Newsletter ("Alzheimer's Disease," 1992) reported that nearly 50% of those over 85 experience some form of dementia. Older people with dementia and other chronic diseases that make independent living difficult or impossible are at the greatest risk for maltreatment (Lachs & Pillemer, 1995; Wolf, 1997).

The National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA, 1998) reported that 3% of adults over 60 in the United States are victims of elder abuse or neglect. Record from Canada estimates the incidence of elder maltreatment at 4% of the population (Hornick et al., 1992). This translates into at least 560,000 incidents of elder maltreatment in the United States in 1996 and more than 100,000 annually in Canada. If that rate holds steady, by 2050 there will be nearly 2 million incidents annually in the United States. The mean age of those who have been abused is 76.5 years (Tatara, 1996). NCEA (1998) research found that 58% of the reported cases involved women, but Tatara ...