Collaborator Spotlight: EDC.org

Since 1958, EDC.org has engaged partners worldwide in sustainable, community-led initiatives that address the world’s most pressing challenges. One of the initiatives that exists under EDC’s umbrella is the National Collaboratory to Address Elder Mistreatment (NCAEM), which unites leading national experts in the design, testing and implementation of a model to effectively identify and manage elder mistreatment in emergency departments. Experts engaged with NCAEM have created and launched the Elder Mistreatment Emergency Department (EMED) Toolkit, recruited 45 institutions to adopt the elder mistreatment care model and supported clinicians looking to expand this work through its mentorship program.

Through NCAEM, EDC has been able to connect leading elder mistreatment researchers to collaborate in ways they have not before, serving as a neutral convener to help these individuals utilize their expertise to work toward a common goal. 

“We were charged by the funder, the John A. Hartford Foundation, with developing a model for addressing elder mistreatment,” said Kristin Lees Haggerty, PhD, principal investigator for NCAEM and assistant professor of gerontology in emergency medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. “But where that model was to sit and what that model looked like, we didn’t know. Through a series of meetings and convenings, a systematic literature review and collaboration with people on the ground, we eventually landed on situating the model in the emergency department.”

Once the team determined that their model to address elder mistreatment would be designed specifically for emergency departments, they made a commitment to create a tool that could be adapted for a variety of ED settings. 

“We needed to be grounded in the reality that most emergency medicine is practiced in small community hospitals or large city hospitals, not academic medical centers,” Lees Haggerty said. “I’m really proud of the amount of co-design that we did with partners in a diverse set of emergency departments.”

In addition to catering to emergency departments of all locations and sizes, the team realized early on that it would be critical to help EDs connect to community resources to help older adults experiencing elder mistreatment after their visit. To meet this need, especially for EDs with fewer resources, the team created the Community Connections Roadmap. 

The roadmap helps emergency departments build relationships with Adult Protective Services (APS), where they would ultimately report a case of elder abuse mistreatment. In addition to APS, the roadmap showcases examples of other community-based organizations that they should identify to provide assistance in these cases.

Another component of the program is the institutional assessment profile, which requires emergency departments to survey their staff to determine what gaps exist in their knowledge and training in identifying and responding to elder mistreatment. 

“When we completed the feasibility testing of the program, we consistently found that people weren’t getting trained in elder mistreatment, they do think it’s a big issue and they want streamlined tools to do something about it,” Lees Haggerty said. 

Once EDs determine that their staff desires additional training, they’re able to point them to the CME-accredited training platforms provided as part of the toolkit, Lees Haggerty said.

In all, the EMED Toolkit Training Program includes the institutional assessment profile, online training modules, Community Connections Roadmap and the screening and assessment tool. The process of creating each component was iterative, and included collaboration with key partners at every stage. 

When it came time to get the completed program into the hands of ED clinicians and staff, NCAEM partnered with GEDC to disseminate it.

“We worked with GEDC after we conducted a formal feasibility study of the program,” Lees Haggerty said. “Through that study, we refined the tools with additional feedback and built it into a GEDC Implementation Toolkit.”

“The toolkit was a response to a need that GEDC was hearing independently, and we were building it, so it was kind of like a perfect marriage.”