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Lessons learned about how to involve and sustain Adult Protective Services staff within multidisciplinary teams
^ABSTRACT Elder abuse multidisciplinary teams (MDT) are a person-centered intervention to help ameliorate elder abuse. Teams of professionals from across disciplines and systems aim to increase safety and reduce suffering and risk of harm to older victims at the earliest juncture via coordinated case reviews and tailored responses. Adult Protective Services (APS) is critically important to successful team functioning. APS benefits from involvement on the teams and the teams are made stronger by APS participation. This article offers lessons learned about involving and sustaining APS on multidisciplinary teams. | key words: elder abuse, multidisciplinary teams, MDTs, adult protective services, APS, specialists
Historically, professionals, organizations, and systems have operated in silos in their responses to elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation cases. This leaves professionals unaware of parallel investigations and interventions that may be co-occurring and under-utilizing available community resources needed to effectively respond to complex elder abuse situations. In addition, uncoordinated responses can result in service duplication or unrecognized service gaps. But this landscape is changing.
Multidisciplinary teams (MDT), used successfully in the child abuse and domestic violence fields, have emerged as a vehicle for addressing the complexity of elder abuse cases. This article briefly describes the work of MDTs' elder abuse case review process, highlights the important role of professionals from Adult Protective Services (APS) on MDTs, and suggests ideas for sustaining APS involvement on MDTs. While this article focuses on the experience of APS team members on the MDTs in New York City (where this article's authors are based), it aims to touch on the broad issues that are applicable to teams located elsewhere.
What Are MDTs?
The MDT is a powerful person-centered, collaborative, highly coordinated intervention. Elder abuse teams, composed of professionals from across systems and disciplines, work to increase safety and reduce suffering and risk of harm to older victims at the earliest possible juncture, through coordinated case reviews and tailored responses to each situation. MDTs usually are convened and led by community-based or government organizations knowledgeable about elder abuse.
The elder abuse field saw a few MDTs emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, with more developing in each subsequent decade. By 2014, elder justice stakeholders...