ACL is awarding six Elder Justice Innovation Grants that seek to improve results for adult protective services (APS) clients. The two-year cooperative agreements total $3,111,147.
This funding will be used to assess and understand the various community services that produce better outcomes for people transitioning from short-term APS interventions to broader community-based programs that remediate and prevent recurrence of abuse over the longer term. The goal of these projects is to improve the field of elder abuse prevention and intervention by developing programs and materials that can be widely disseminated or replicated, and by establishing, or contributing to, the evidence base on what works best to improve results for APS clients.
2022 Improving Results for APS Clients Elder Justice Innovation Grants:
- Allegheny County Department of Human Services, Area Agency on Aging (DHS/AAA) will implement “Pathways to Safety,” a scalable and collaborative protective services intervention aimed at preventing people over 60 who have experienced abuse from being re-victimized by leveraging data and practice-based evidence of effective services.
- Regents of the University of Minnesota will seek to understand the effects of a new adult protection law in Minnesota–Chapter 45A–that authorizes temporary account holds and third-party disclosures to address financial exploitation. The project will result in a new Chapter 45A case management system, training materials to facilitate collaboration and cross-referrals between APS and law enforcement, and a de-identified data set to facilitate future analysis.
- Salisbury University will expand the prevention, response, investigation, and protection of Worcester County, Maryland’s elder population from fraud by increasing the pipeline of qualified financial and high-tech crime investigators. They will leverage the Salisbury University Fraud Program, Salisbury University students, and the expertise of Salisbury University faculty.
- University of Southern California seeks to develop and implement an algorithm that can identify cases that are appropriate for presentation to an adult maltreatment multidisciplinary team (MDT) and that leads to improved outcomes for clients whose cases are presented to the MDT. The algorithm will be designed to assess the degree to which the proposed algorithmic approach to case findings for MDTs will result in measurable improvements in the status of clients at case closure and, to the extent it can be determined, during a follow-up period, as well as whether the risk of recurrent maltreatment will be reduced.
- University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston will demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of a community-based stepped-care program; with the goal of increasing long term-meaningful social engagement; and decreasing elder mistreatment and self-neglect recurrence, loneliness, and depression in isolated APS clients.
- Virginia Commonwealth University will mitigate challenges and barriers to reporting elder abuse by developing and disseminating an interactive, web-based “Safety Connector” for use by practitioners, older adults, and caregivers who seek to link themselves or others to systems of care.