Elder Mistreatment

In this guidebook, authors from various disciplines distinguish conflicts in ethical issues among elder abuse victims, precipitators, and professional care providers and propose ways to address these differences. Elder Mistreatment: Ethical Issues, Dilemmas, and Decisions identifies key differences and similarities in professional ethical protocols and shows how differences may be addressed to achieve consensus in ethical decisionmaking.For some time now, helping professionals involved with cases of elder abuse have recognized the need to begin a dialogue on applying ethical principles to practice. The subject of ethics, while always a part of services, has been difficult to articulate in practice because its roots come from principles of belief rather than objective, absolute criteria. For this reason, professionals have erred on the side of practice methods rather than the deeper issues of values protocols for clients and professionals.Elder Mistreatment raises the question of how to identify ethical values and their starting points among all parties in the elder abuse situation, determine whether dilemmas may arise with competing values, and initiate moves toward consensus. Professionals from the fields of medicine, social work, law, religion, and ethics review three cases of mistreatment, identify the ethical values, issues, and dilemmas as they relate to both the client/patient and their particular profession. In this way, the reader can compare the similarities and differences among professional starting points. The final chapter in this book, written by a medical ethicist, describes how members from different professions working as a multidisciplinary team might be able to integrate differing perceptions of the dilemmas into greater consensus in the process of ethical decisionmaking in cases of elder mistreatment. Throughout the case studies and chapters, these topics are covered in depth:

communicative ethics
autonomy
beneficence
non-maleficence
justice
community-based multidisciplinary care
legal competence
clinical competenceReaders at all levels in the following fields will benefit from this guidebook: social workers, physicians, nurses, allied health professionals, psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists, clergy, lawyers, paralegals, and ethicists.