Elder Justice Champions are people or organizations who are advancing the field of elder justice through innovation, strategic partnerships, new programs and initiatives, and/or good old-fashioned elbow grease. These are the people that inspire us and who we want to support in turn. Please let us know if there are any elder justice champions that we should consider spotlighting!
Dr. Tony Rosen
Dr. Tony Rosen has a unique specialty — geriatric emergency medicine. Older adults who are victims of abuse, neglect, or exploitation are in many cases unlikely to leave the home for any reason. An ER visit might be the only time the elder leaves their home. That makes it an important opportunity to use this opportunity to identify elder abuse, report it, and to intervene.
Dr. Rosen founded and is leading the Vulnerable Elder Protection Team (VEPT) at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. The Vulnerable Elder Protection Team is an innovative emergency room-based elder abuse response team that includes social workers, physicians, emergency medical services workers, hospital security personnel, and public health professionals. The Vulnerable Elder Protection Team is available to patients 24/7 to improve identification, comprehensive medical and forensic assessment, and treatment for potential victims of elder abuse or neglect. This service will increase identification and reporting, ensure the safety of these high-risk and complex patients, and this model will allow emergency rooms to respond quickly and appropriately to elder abuse.
He also recently collaborated on the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society study on emergency rooms’ underreporting of elder abuse, and was awarded the highly prestigious Beeson Award. As part of the award, Dr. Rosen will receive a major grant to comprehensively analyze injury patterns from victims of physical elder abuse to increase the ability of emergency and other health care providers to identify, report, and intervene.
Dr. Rosen explains, “victims of elder abuse present to emergency medicine physicians commonly – but we’re treating their medical complaint and not identifying that they’re victims. With the Beeson Award, I hope to try to improve our ability as emergency medicine physicians to identify cases of abuse and to help these patients in the emergency department.”