Le Centre fédéral d’Expertise des Soins de Santé (KCE) (The Belgian Health Care Knowledge Center) publishes a scientific report on the fight against mistreatment in their country. Marie Beaulieu was consulted as an international expert. (December 2020)
Entitled ‘How to Better Tackle Elder Abuse in Belgium?’, the report identifies avenues for improving detection and taking charge of situations of mistreatment of older adults in this country.
In Belgium, as elsewhere, the statistics available to government authorities, the scientific community, and health care and social services professionals seem to underestimate the phenomenon as the flagging of situations is below the level of actual cases.
On this basis, the Knowledge Center’s study identified the obstacles to identifying situations of mistreatment and the effects they produce on the intervention practices of this area of activities in Belgium.
Among other things, it is a question of divergent interpretations of professional confidentiality that create important obstacles to the communication of information pertinent to intervention. To this, add insufficient training for healthcare and services providers concerning the specifics of the fight against mistreatment combined with a lack of tools that could support their detection and intervention efforts.
To share this portrait of the situation to a broad audience and to improve conditions for the actors involved in the fight against mistreatment in Belgium, the Knowledge Center has made available the following documents: