| Summary: |
Elder abuse and its health/well-being outcomes are increasingly a source of great concern world-wide, but there is relatively little concrete information about these subjects. Some available findings suggest that the abuse of elder persons is relatively common and have negative health/well-being outcomes. However, these findings present various limitations. For example, elder abuse prevalence/incidence data are shaky and inconsistent, the data are in many cases based on care-givers reports rather than on reports from the elder's themselves and the assessment of elder abuse has often as starting point a broad range of blurred conceptualizations.
The lack of reliable data about elder abuse and its health/well-being effects are evident in the EU, not least in the States participating in the project. For example, not only there is a lack of reliable data about the prevalence and effects of elder abuse, but also on availability and effectiveness of procedures in reporting it as well as on possible prevention and treatment strategies. Nor there are cross-national data addressing issues of cultural differences, for instance, in the perception of the phenomenon.
There is therefore an enormous need of confident data on the situation of older people with regard to these topics. This will be tackled by the project through collecting, among other things, representative and comparable data on the magnitude/characteristics of elder abuse, its determinants and health/well-being effects in 7 Member States. This will allow relying on standardized statistics to facilitate comparisons between countries, thus, contributing to the planning and/or improvement of policies related to the care of the abused older women/men namely in terms of for instance health services provision, reporting strategies and prevention programmes.
A crucial added value of this project will consist in the delivery of comparable data on the influence of culture on the p  |
Summary
Elder abuse and its health/well-being outcomes are increasingly a source of great concern world-wide, but there is relatively little concrete information about these subjects. Some available findings suggest that the abuse of elder persons is relatively common and have negative health/well-being outcomes. However, these findings present various limitations. For example, elder abuse prevalence/incidence data are shaky and inconsistent, the data are in many cases based on care-givers reports rather than on reports from the elder's themselves and the assessment of elder abuse has often as starting point a broad range of blurred conceptualizations.
The lack of reliable data about elder abuse and its health/well-being effects are evident in the EU, not least in the States participating in the project. For example, not only there is a lack of reliable data about the prevalence and effects of elder abuse, but also on availability and effectiveness of procedures in reporting it as well as on possible prevention and treatment strategies. Nor there are cross-national data addressing issues of cultural differences, for instance, in the perception of the phenomenon.
There is therefore an enormous need of confident data on the situation of older people with regard to these topics. This will be tackled by the project through collecting, among other things, representative and comparable data on the magnitude/characteristics of elder abuse, its determinants and health/well-being effects in 7 Member States. This will allow relying on standardized statistics to facilitate comparisons between countries, thus, contributing to the planning and/or improvement of policies related to the care of the abused older women/men namely in terms of for instance health services provision, reporting strategies and prevention programmes.
A crucial added value of this project will consist in the delivery of comparable data on the influence of culture on the perceptions of elder abuse. From a methodological point of view, the project will furthermore provide and disseminate a validated assessment tool potentially available in the future to anybody addressing issues of elder abuse with the aim of identifying its possible health and well-being consequences, and will disseminate its findings across EU and interested organisations. |