The Prevalence of Resident-to-Resident Elder Mistreatment in Nursing Homes

Abstract

National Institute on Aging.

State of the science on prevention of elder abuse and lessons learned from child abuse and domestic violence prevention: Toward a conceptual framework for research

“…Financial abuse has been observed to be highly prevalent. In institutions, the most common form of abuse has been identified as resident-to-resident, estimated to occur in 20% of residents (Lachs et al, 2016). Although not as common, another form of abuse in institutional settings is staff-to-resident abuse (Pillemer & Moore, 1989).…”

“…An issue in determining abuse in both the community and institutional setting is cognitive capacity and intent. People who are cognitively intact or mildly impaired have decision-making capacity (Marson, Chaterjee, Ingram, & Harrell, 1996) and many with moderate impairment are able to make decisions such as to appoint a health care proxy (Mezey, Teresi, Ramsey, Mitty, & Bobrowitz, 2000), consent to an extended interview, and report and engage in abuse (Lachs et al, 2016). For example, in the study by Lachs et al, about half of those engaged in resident-to-resident mistreatment had no or mild cognitive impairment and another fifth were only moderately cognitively impaired.…”

“…Additionally, rates are higher in settings which house such individuals, for example, assisted living (Castle & Beach, 2013) and nursing homes (Castle, 2012; Lachs, et al, 2016). Dementing illness and psychiatric and neurological disorders are precipitating conditions that can lead both directly as well as indirectly to mistreatment through stress-inducing symptoms such as behavior disorders and functional dependence.…”

Implementation and evaluation of an education programme for nursing staff on recognising, reporting and managing resident‐to‐resident elder mistreatment in aged care facilities

“…Researchers have used different words to describe these aggressive interactions between older people living in aged care facilities (R‐REM) including mistreatment (Ellis et al., ; Lachs et al., ; Ramirez et al., ; Rosen et al., ; Teresi et al., ), aggression (Pillemer et al., ; Rosen, Lachs, et al., ; Rosen, Pillemer, & Lachs, ), abuse (Castle, ), violence (Snellgrove, Beck, Green, & McSweeney, ), violence incidents (Shinoda‐Tagawa et al., ), relational aggression (Trompetter, Scholte, & Westerhof, ), among others (McDonald, Hitzig, et al., ).…”

“…A prevalence of 20.2% for R‐REM, was estimated in older people exposed to at least one of the subtypes of R‐REM (in a 1‐month observation period) and the most common abuse was verbal aggression (9.1%) followed by physical abuse (5.2%) and sexual violence (0.6%) (Lachs et al., ). This indicates that many older people living in aged care facilities have experienced R‐REM in their daily life and can be exposed to serious harm (Ferrah et al., ; Lachs et al., ) including fatal events (Ferrah et al., ; Lachs et al., ; Lindner et al., ; Murphy et al., ).…”