ABSTRACT

For hospitals and other health-care services, identifying older people experiencing abuse remains a challenge. Social workers at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne (SVHM) used a clinical data mining approach to retrospectively audit electronic medical records containing 466 episodes of care over a five-year period where elder abuse was identified based on a system of alerts. The findings highlight key characteristics of the vulnerable older persons, the perpetrators, their social contexts, and interventions undertaken, clarifying a range of vulnerability and risk factors in the sample. Half were aged 80 years and over; two thirds lived with the person of concern; two thirds were from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and a third had cognitive impairment. A high proportion were assessed as being at moderate to high levels of risk, requiring urgent to prompt intervention. Audit findings strengthened knowledge and led to improvements in elder abuse responses by social workers, which included policy development, training, risk management and safety planning processes, resourcing, and research initiatives. This paper describes how social workers engaged in data collection and analysis to inform their practice within a health-care setting and contributed to service evaluation and improvements.

IMPLICATIONS

• This paper demonstrates how social workers can conceptualise and engage in research to better understand a social problem: in this case, it was responding to elder abuse, within a hospital setting.

• This paper highlights how social workers can use evidence from practitioner-driven research to inform practice and improve service outcomes for those they work with.

摘要

对于医院和其他医疗保健服务而言，确定遭受虐待的老年人仍然是一个挑战。墨尔本圣文森特医院（SVHM）的社会工作者使用临床数据挖掘方法来回顾性审核电子医疗记录，该电子病历在五年内根据警报系统确定了虐待老年人的情况，其中包含466次护理事件。调查结果强调了易受伤害的老年人，犯罪者，他们的社会背景和所采取的干预措施的关键特征，从而阐明了样本中的一系列脆弱性和风险因素。一半年龄在80岁以上；三分之二的人与有关人员同住；三分之二来自文化和语言上的不同背景，三分之一有认知障碍。很大一部分人被评估为中等至高风险水平，需要紧急及时干预。审计结果增强了知识，并改善了社会工作者对老年人的虐待应对措施，包括政策制定，培训，风险管理和安全计划流程，资源配置和研究计划。本文描述了社会工作者如何在卫生保健环境中从事数据收集和分析，以告知他们的做法，并有助于服务评估和改善。

含义

• 本文演示了社会工作者如何概念化和参与研究以更好地理解社会问题：在这种情况下，它是在医院环境中对老年人的虐待做出的回应。

• 本文重点介绍了社会工作者如何利用从业者驱动的研究中得到的证据来为实践提供信息并改善与他们合作的人的服务成果。