Elder Abuse - One Sure Way to Detect It

The stories about elder abuse keep getting worse and worse. As more of our seniors are retiring, elder care facilities are bursting at the seams. Every year up to 2,000,000 vulnerable elders are abused or neglected. Those are the cases we know about. For every one of those there are five more that are never reported.

Many politicians feel that not enough attention is being given to the problem. They point out that penalties for animal abuse are more severe than for elder abuse.

"It's hard to know because of the secrecy when nursing home residents are cared for at night with some of the staff or the secrecy that occurs behind closed doors in anyone's individual homes," says Iris Freeman of the Center on Elder Justice and Policy at the William Mitchell College of Law.

"Many cases of deprivation occur in such secrecy, in such silence, that by the time the victim is found there has been such disastrous harm that the victim is not likely to live," says Iris.

There was a government survey done not long ago that showed as many as 60% of all long-term care facilities had employees with criminal records.

The home healthcare industry is barely regulated and so the chance for abuse is even greater. With more families opting for hiring their own care workers the opportunities for abuse in a home healthcare setting is much more obvious.

Part of the problem is due to the growth in the nursing home and long-term care industry. Because of that growth there is a higher demand for employees, and quite frankly there just aren't enough qualified ones to go around which leads to shortcuts in the vetting process for employees. Employers feel it's better to have a warm body than a qualified body. Therein lies the problem.

So if you have parents that are in a long-term care facility, nursing home or home healthcare setting, one of the best things you can do is install a motion activated Covert Hidden Camera in their room to keep an eye on them to see what is going on with them. Most hidden cameras have DVRs in them so they can record motion activation and allow you to play back easily on an SD card that's in the DVR. If abuse is detected, you have strong visual evidence that will aid in prosecution.

Often in these cases, especially with Alzheimer's patients, the credibility of the patient is questioned and they are not given much credence. This can be eliminated by having strong visual evidence that only a hidden camera can produce.