The Effectiveness of Psychosocial Interventions for Elder Abuse in Community Settings: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

As a global public health concern, elder abuse negatively affects health, psychosocial wellbeing, and mortality among elders. Research and practice efforts made to explore effective prevention and intervention strategies are growing. Despite the growing number of intervention studies on elder abuse, research synthesis on the empirical literature seems lacking. This study aims to identify the pooled effect size of prevention and interventions targeted ultimate and intermediate outcomes for elder abuse that occurred in community settings. Following the Cochrane guideline, our team searched across eight electronic databases and manually searched reference lists of eligible studies and existing systematic reviews for all potentially eligible studies. A random-effects model of 51 effect size estimates reported an overall positive and statistically significant treatment effect of psychosocial interventions for elder abuse, d = 0.63, p < 0.05. The overall treatment effect was approaching statistical significance at 0.1 level for ultimate outcomes, d = 0.32, p = 0.09, and intermediate outcomes, d = 0.75, p = 0.1. An overall significant effect size was found among family-based interventions, d = 0.59, p < 0.05, and interventions targeting older adults and their caregivers, d = 0.45, p < 0.05. Existing evidence supports an overall significant effect for psychosocial interventions for elder abuse. Interventions that used a family-based model, combined education and supportive services, and targeted both caregivers and elders, showed significant effect size, suggesting such features being considered in elder abuse intervention design. Future intervention research is needed to shed light on the link between intervention activities and ultimate change in elder abuse behaviors.

The Context of Elder Maltreatment: an Opportunity for Prevention Science

“…In addition to the review-of-reviews on the effectiveness of EM interventions (Marshall et al, 2020 ), we identified four additional scoping/systematic reviews or meta-analysis studies (Burnes et al, 2021 ; Kayser et al, 2021 ; Shen et al, 2021 ; Van Royen et al, 2020 ) relevant to EM intervention for a total of 92 distinct studies on EM interventions represented across the five reviewed papers. Details about these studies, including key findings and recommendations, are provided in Table 1 .…”

Prevalence of Violence Perpetrated by Healthcare Workers in Long-Term Care: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Although several reviews found that some interventions were successful in improving knowledge and attitudes about violence, these concluded that there was insufficient evidence on their effectiveness in reducing the extent of abuse [16,[40][41][42]. Nevertheless, the use of multiple approaches such as education and support services seemed to be effective, as a mixed approach showed significant effects [43]. Thus, interventions using mixed approaches may be more effective, especially if combined with the use of technology (e.g., wearables, monitoring systems) that could track episodes of violence while maintaining the privacy of patients and HCWs [44].…”

Scientific Publication Patterns of Systematic Reviews on Psychosocial Interventions Improving Well-being: Bibliometric Analysis

“…Future research on PIs should focus on the needs of older patients [ 54 ] and connections between intervention activities and ultimate change in behaviors related to abuse of older individuals [ 17 ].…”

“…A multicomponent psychosocial intervention (PI) was evaluated as being effective in improving cognitive functioning, social interaction, and well-being [ 15 ] and in decreasing pain [ 16 ] among patients with dementia. A systematic review by Shen et al [ 17 ] supports the effectiveness of PIs combined with family-based models, education, supportive services for caregivers, and abuse of older individuals. Another study suggested that physical activity is positively correlated but sedentary behaviors are negatively associated with psychosocial well-being in early childhood [ 18 ].…”