The Adult Protective Services (APS) program — the unit charged with investigating allegations of elder abuse — has clawed its way out from under a backlog of hundreds of cases. Susan Wehry, commissioner of the Department of Aging and Independent Living (DAIL), said her department made two key changes to get the caseload under control — it hired additional investigators and it established a financial exploitation unit.
“The crisis is over. We are stable. We have an ace team of investigators,” Wehry told the House Human Services Committee last week.
But advocates attribute the success in whittling down the backlog to something else. They say APS has grown more conservative when making decisions about what warrants an investigation and what constitutes abuse.
That complaint stems from anecdotal evidence and one striking statistic. Vermont’s substantiation rate — the percentage of cases that are deemed to be actual abuse— remains one of the lowest in the nation. The national average is 44 percent, whereas the Vermont average falls somewhere between 8 percent and 10 percent, according APS calculations.
“Now there are some people that aren’t ever going to be helped because their cases aren’t going to be investigated,” said Barbara Prine, an attorney with Vermont Legal Aid. Prine said APS is investigating fewer reports of abuse, and the substantiation rate among cases it does investigate is suspiciously low.
Wehry said approximately 50 percent of the reports APS receives are opened for investigation.
When abuse is reported, an APS intake specialist speaks with the person filing the complaint to determine whether or not it warrants an investigation. If it is decided that it does, the case is assigned to an investigator who determines whether actual abuse has occurred. The case must meet two conditions to be substantiated — the alleged victim has to qualify, under statutory definition, as a “vulnerable adult,” and the alleged activity must meet the definition of “abuse, neglect, or exploitation.”
Advocates did commend APS for the progress it has made in tackling the backlog, which was in the hundreds in 2010 and 2011. Ann Pugh, chair of Human Services, said her committee is focused strictly on present problems. “I don’t want to rehash what was not working before,” Pugh said.
Still, the atmosphere last Thursday was squirmy at times, since many of the advocates are in litigation with DAIL over its alleged failure to promptly investigate a case of elder abuse.
In the last year, APS has rejected patient reports of elder abuse, advocates say. Sandy Conrad, executive director of Southwestern Vermont Area Agency on Aging, said her agency filed a report on behalf of an 89-year-old woman whose granddaughter had repeatedly threatened to murder her. It took APS three days to respond, and when it did, it ruled the report “unsubstantiated.”
Pugh asked Conrad and other advocates to supply data to give the committee a sense of the pervasiveness of cases like this.
Ed Paquin, executive director of Disability Rights Vermont, said the paucity of data put out by APS makes it hard for them to do so. “Being able to clearly know what’s going on is one of our biggest challenges right now,” he said.
Wehry said DAIL itself has an incomplete picture of the data. APS had been keeping records by hand; they switched to a new data tracking system in April 2012, but, Wehry said, “there are holes.” There are 575 holes in the investigation records for 2012. That year 1,358 investigations were carried out, and, according to APS data, 106 of these were substantiated and 677 rejected. The others are missing from the record.
While advocates agree that APS is doing a better job dealing with cases in a timely fashion, they say that some languish too long. State law requires that APS launch an investigation within 48 hours of a case being filed. Vermont Legal Aid reviewed 42 cases filed during June 2012, and found that 40 percent were not addressed within the mandated time period. Some lay dormant for up to eight days.
Conrad said APS response times are much better than a few years ago, when filing reports was on par with “sending them into a black hole.”
