Amid deepening concern about violence in Minnesota senior care homes, state regulators on Wednesday unveiled an ambitious plan to accelerate investigations of elder abuse and reduce the state's massive backlog of unresolved cases.
At a state Senate committee hearing Wednesday morning, Human Services Commissioner Emily Piper said a team of officials is sorting through more than 2,300 maltreatment complaints — reports that have never been reviewed by state regulators because of poor record-keeping and other inefficiencies at the state agency charged with protecting seniors. Another 826 maltreatment cases have been assigned for investigation but have never been resolved.
With a backlog that grew into thousands of cases and hundreds of new complaints arriving each week, the Health Department is unlikely to catch up before December, officials said, even with a set of reforms designed to streamline the handling of allegations.
"We are working to ensure that loved ones are not left in the dark and complaint investigations are completed in a timely manner," Piper told the panel of senators.
Piper's testimony provided the most detailed look yet at the state's alarming backlog of uninvestigated elder abuse cases and comes as the Dayton administration faces mounting pressure to improve safety at nearly 1,800 residential senior care facilities across the state. At Wednesday's hearing, Republicans and Democrats alike took turns criticizing regulators and the senior care industry for failing to recognize the surge in abuse cases sooner and demanded immediate reforms.
"This isn't just smoke. This is an inferno," said Sen. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, chairman of the Senate Human Services Finance and Policy Committee.
Breakdowns in the state's handling of maltreatment complaints in senior homes were highlighted in a five-part Star Tribune investigation published in November. The series documented that hundreds of residents at senior care centers across Minnesota are beaten, sexually assaulted or robbed each year. Yet the vast majority of these incidents are never resolved, and the perpetrators go unpunished, in part because the state health agency lacks the resources to investigate them.
Even when cases are investigated they often drag on for months, undermining criminal prosecutions and frustrating families of abuse victims, the Star Tribune found.