A local violence-prevention organization will be one of the beneficiaries of $3 million in provincial funding over three years.
St. Albert’s Stop Abuse in Families (SAIF) Society is one of 19 organizations in the province to benefit from the provincial Elder Abuse Co-ordinated Community Response grant, announced by Seniors Minister Sarah Hoffman last Monday.
Doreen Slessor, the society’s executive director, said the cash injection will help to refine and streamline the elder-abuse work already underway in St. Albert in the form of an elder abuse protocol created six years ago.
“This grant is just kind of the next step for us to make it better – to analyze it, make it solid, link our protocols so that there’s nobody that falls through the cracks because we’re not able to talk to each other appropriately about cases.”
The challenge facing service providers is there are several organizations that provide services in one way or another to those providing elder abuse support in the community, and sometimes because of privacy legislation or other regulations, providers can’t always effectively share information.
There is, however, a grant-funded elder abuse coordinator to help oversee efforts and direct clients or potential clients to the appropriate resource within the Elder Abuse Prevention Committee, composed of different services provider representatives, including FCSS, the RCMP, Victim Services, St. Albert Further Education and the local primary care network.
“If there’s an issue, a family that someone might be concerned about, they can phone our coordinator,” Slessor said. “We have one central reporting person who will take the cases, take the information, then go to the committee.”
St. Albert RCMP Cpl. Laurel Kading said the news of this most recent grant is very positive, noting how important the committee is.
“The work of this committee is beneficial to the community, and the seniors are benefitting,” she said.
Slessor emphasized that the issue of elder abuse isn’t something that happens elsewhere. It happens here in St. Albert at a rate that might surprise some residents; in the first three months of 2015 service providers in St. Albert had 133 active cases of elder abuse, the vast majority having to do with money in one form or another.
“Typically elder abuse in our community, 90 per cent of elder abuse is around financial abuse,” she said.
This type of abuse can take many forms, from a child keeping a little too tight a grip on a parent’s finances, all the way through to outright theft or fraud.
Slessor said in one case in St. Albert, a grandchild helped her grandfather set up online banking, only to clean out his account to feed a drug addiction.
The other most common type of elder abuse in St. Albert involves neglect and social isolation, where a senior with reduced mobility or otherwise reduced faculties is dependent on just one or two people for their social stimulation, which may not always be forthcoming.
To make matters even more difficult to sort out, as consenting adults, if a senior is in an abusive situation but does not consent to leave, then the role of service providers is limited to support and education.
For more information about elder abuse and resources in St. Albert, visit www.stopabuse.ca.
