On his appointment in July last year, NSW Ageing and Disability Commissioner Robert Fitzgerald AM promised retirement village operators that they would be held responsible for elder abuse in their villages – now the data suggests that operators and the community are heeding the call.
The Commission’s Ageing and Disability Abuse helpline received 10,443 calls between 1 July 2019 and 30 June 2020, according to its first dashboard report – higher than the previous Elder Abuse helpline figure of 6,376 in FY18-19.
Of these calls, the highest numbers were recorded in May (18% higher than the average of 870 calls a month) and June (46% higher than the average) this year – suggesting that the easing of lockdown measures is leading to more potential cases of abuse being detected.
Around 75% of reports concerned older people with over two-thirds of these reports (69.6%) relating to older women and the largest number relating to people aged 80 to 84.
While adult children accounted for one-third of calls (32.5%), interestingly paid workers were the next highest at 23.5%, indicating that home care workers or other support workers could be reporting concerns.
As expected, most of the allegations concerned adult children (56.7%) with just 5.8% relating to a paid worker.
Psychological abuse also topped the list of allegations (35.8%) followed by financial abuse (30.6%) and neglect (18.4%).
