State officials will soon disclose information on elder abuse investigations and agency regulation compliance.
Critical information about whether county protective services agencies are keeping elderly safe from abuse will soon be made available to the public. A top PA administration official said in a recent interview that the state will take a harder stance towards ending contracts with those groups that fail to correct ongoing issues.
A local news outlet published a report highlighting how delays, secrecy, and government inaction have left elderly in Pennsylvania vulnerable to abuse, neglect, and even death. The reporting showed that since 2017, up to one-third of the 52 county Area Agencies on Aging failed to comply with state regulations in a given year. Many of those agencies also failed to complete investigations within the 20-day timeframe required by the state.
Also in 2017, 60% of the agencies were not monitored at all.
Next month, the Department of Aging will begin disclosing information relating to overall compliance with state regulations and the 20-day requirement, said Aging Secretary Jason Kavulich. Kavulich said, “It helps the community understand what’s going on, and it helps the community to say to their [county] organization, ‘You need to do better.’”
The local media investigation found that a 75-year-old woman in Philadelphia suffering from dementia died after the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging failed to investigate her case and provide needed services in a timely manner.
In 2021, the poor performance of the agency caused state officials to reassign specialists to help handle such investigations.
Kavulich indicated that when the state’s contracts with the county agencies are renewed later in the year, the department plans to add language penalizing agencies that cannot or will not correct such deficiencies. Kavulich said if agencies fail to make necessary changes, “we have to take serious action, we have to look at de-designation.”
Despite the issues highlighted in the report, Kavulich denied systemic problems in Pennsylvania’s protection of older adults. “Is there a crisis and a problem? No. Is there always room to do better? Yes,” he said in a recent interview.
The Department of Aging has implemented a new system for monitoring county compliance, called the Comprehensive Aging Performance Evaluation (CAPE).
Of the new CAPE system, Kavulich said, “If you pulled an old monitoring, you would see, ‘in my opinion,’ or ‘I think’ – all statements that should not appear in monitoring. When you’re monitoring an agency, your opinion doesn’t matter. It’s about the work, not your opinion of the person or the work.”
The new system will assign equal weight to every category it assesses towards an agency’s overall compliance score.
In the past, more value was placed on less serious issues. Peter Hans, a former protective services specialist at the Department of Aging, said the overall score for a county agency to receive a compliant grade dropped from 85% to 75%. “How does this help the older adults? It doesn’t. It helps the counties,” he said.
