SERINO ASSEMBLES ADVOCATES TO CRACK DOWN ON ELDER ABUSE

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY—Senator Sue Serino (R, C, I—Hyde Park) brought together a group of local and statewide aging advocates, law enforcement and community members today for her third in a series of ‘Elder Abuse Prevention Roundtables’ at the Boardman Road Library in Poughkeepsie.

“Elder abuse presents a multi-faceted challenge like no other,” Serino continued. “My goal as the Aging Chair is to bring a broader understanding of the issue to the forefront because solutions simply won’t arise until people truly understand what’s happening, start recognizing when their loved ones or their neighbors are vulnerable and start speaking up.”

Senator Serino held her first ‘Elder Abuse Prevention Roundtable’ this time last year and the ideas that came out of it helped to shape her agenda for the legislative year.

Serino, who chairs the Senate’s Aging Committee, continued, “I believe in bringing everyone to the table to find workable, effective solutions. Doing so has helped me secure major wins for seniors in a short amount of time, including significant funding to combat elder abuse and to reduce the exorbitant number of individuals waiting for Community Services for the Elderly (CSE)—a list that includes some 15,000 New Yorkers.”

As Senator Serino has noted in the past, according to the National Council on Aging, up to five million cases of elder abuse occur each year across the country and researchers estimate that up to 85% of those incidents go unreported.

Participants in today’s roundtable included statewide aging advocates, representatives from the Dutchess and Putnam Aging Offices, the Dutchess County District Attorney’s Office, Dutchess County’s Department of Family Services, the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, and the banking industry who were on hand to address issues of financial elder abuse—a crime that costs U.S. seniors billions of dollars each year.

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