Sons and daughters are draining the bank accounts of their elderly parents, says Age Concern, with around 50 reported cases in Nelson this year.
Age Concern came forward with its concerns around elder abuse in Nelson and Tasman after reading the new chief medical officer’s comments about the region’s ageing population in last week’s Nelson Weekly.
Age Concern Nelson manager Sue Tilby says Dr Nick Baker is spot on to highlight the issue and they are disturbed and concerned about the increasing number of abuse cases they are working on.
This year alone the organisation has 65 proven cases of abuse in Nelson and Tasman, 14 of those for self-neglect, the rest by carers ripping off older people.
“We see a huge amount of financial abuse here in Nelson, a huge amount,” says Sue. “It mainly comes from family members, in fact 77 per cent is from sons and daughters ripping off their parents.”
She says others befriend older people with an ulterior motive to rip them off.
She says it’s hard to get the money back and in two separate cases this year they’ve seen one woman befriend a lonely elderly lady only to have massive cheques written for her. Because the woman signed the cheque they can’t get the money back.
Another case was a carer who was given an elderly woman’s credit card and pin number. She used it to withdraw $25,000 for herself.
Because the woman supplied her with her pin number, no charges were laid and the bank refused to try to recover the money.
She says sometimes they can press charges on the abusers, through police, if the victim will give them permission to investigate.
Often they can’t.
Other major issues are family members not putting elderly parents into homes because they don’t want them to spend their money, or stealing their money once they are in the homes.
“People know the care is costly if they’re not entitled to a subsidy and they see it as their money, their right disappearing far too early and people don’t want their parents to spend their money. We’ve seen an older parent live in appalling basement conditions in a son and daughter’s house because they want to keep that person there because of the money side of it. It’s awful,” she says.
“On the other side of the coin, one that pops up quite frequently is we’ll get a call from a rest home saying that a person there has no money and then they find out that the family member managing their money has taken it.”
Age Concern’s Jess Breeze says self-neglect is also a big issue and of the 14 cases this year she has seen some horrible living conditions. “There have been several really bad cases this year but one of the worst was coming across a client who had very advanced dementia and he wasn’t able to live in his home because there was no space to walk and there was rotting food and rodents and things. It was squalor.”
She says the best way to help those people is for neighbours and family to report any concerns they may have.
“We had quite a successful incident recently where a man was living alone in not the greatest environment but we had a neighbourhood that was really connected and I had several calls of concern from the neighbours so it was good to know that his neighbours were looking out for him. If you see something that doesn’t look right, make a call. It’s better to be over-cautious than not say anything at all,” she says.
Age Concern has just three staff with a fourth likely to join soon, as the workload continues to increase.
Age Concern’s main role is to provide support, advice and advocacy information but it also provides education around elder abuse and organises a volunteer visitor service.
Sue says she was thrilled to read Dr Nick Baker’s comments in the Weekly last week, where he stated the growing population of elderly in Nelson was a “major concern”.
“We’ve done a bit of research around Nelson and we’re going to have a higher than average older person ratio in Nelson. Everyone’s scrambling and trying to keep on top of it but if we don’t act now it could turn into a huge crisis.”
