I hope everyone is doing well! For today’s content, I would like to share with you the exciting things the Medical Examiner’s Office in DeKalb County is implementing. Recently, our office held an elder abuse project meeting with personnel from the Districts Attorneys Office to address elder abuse reporting pathways, facilitators, barriers, and outcomes. The Medical Examiner’s Office introduced the elder abuse meeting because we are interested in applying for an elder abuse grant for the fiscal year 2021. This grant will allow us the opportunity to develop and advance emerging practices to prevent and effectively respond to elder abuse cases. 

Presently, there is no centralized way of reporting elderly deaths so as a result they are being vastly underreported to authorities – medical examiner’s offices and coroner’s offices. This is stemmed from uncertainties in reported elderly deaths from long-term facilities and at-home deaths. Although there are on-staff rotating physicians at long-term facilities, it is not definite each patient is being cared for 24 hours of the day. Regarding in-home deaths, these elderly decedents are being cared for by a caretaker, typically a loved-one, but there is no way of knowing the level of competency of that caretaker. For this reason, the Medical Examiner’s Office would like to be informed of all elderly deaths so they can send trained investigators to the scene to identify potential foul play.

To eliminate the misreporting of elder abuse, the Medical Examiner’s office is in the preliminary stages of conducting research/ gathering data to cross-reference substantial neglect cases from 2013 to 2020 with death certificates. A potential issue we will encounter is properly identifying all elder abuse cases because of the misrepresentation of them on the death certificates. In other words, there will be a very small number of reported elder abuse cases since the majority of elderly people are presumed to have died from natural causes. Even if the decedent was neglected, the cause of death will remain natural processes that were hastened by neglect, but neglect is never mentioned on the death certificate. Therefore, collecting data will help map out reporting pathways and attempts to identify any trends indicating that mistreatment may have been a contributing factor.

Pretty cool right?….. I thought so too!