Helping Seniors Transition from their Homes, Jami Shapiro, Ep. 16

District Attorney Summer Stephan shares what San Diego initiatives are in the works to protect seniors from abuse and fraud. She shares information about her programs and efforts to help keep our most vulnerable citizens safe. Note: A Life and Death Conversation is produced for the ear. The optimal experience will come from listening to it. We provide the transcript as a way to easily navigate to a particular section and for those who would like to follow along using the text. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio which allows you to hear the full emotional impact of the show. A combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers generates transcripts which may contain errors. The corresponding audio should be checked before quoting in print. Contact San Diego District Attorney website Transcript Dr. Bob: In this episode, I speak with San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan, about her passion for protecting elders from abuse and fraud. Summer is leading the way to create a blueprint for a program that brings together many agencies and organizations throughout the county that typically work in silos, including the medical community, in an effort to create programs that protect our most vulnerable members of the population. I for one was inspired by her passion and her commitment, and I will be joining in this effort. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Summer, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day. I'm sure that you have a pretty packed schedule most days, huh? DA Stephan: Oh, well, it is. As a district attorney for the second largest county in the state of California and the fifth largest in the country, we are hopping at all times, but protecting seniors is really a passion for me, so any chance I can get to talk about it and share information and things we've done, I love to do it. Dr. Bob: Fantastic. Well, I'm excited to hear some of ... I've read up and gotten familiar with some of the initiatives in your areas that you're really committed to and devoted to. I mean it spans of course from children to seniors, the whole gamut, but I understand needing to place emphasis on protecting seniors, because there's so many, and the numbers are growing, and I think that they're becoming more and more vulnerable over time. And you mentioned while we were talking a bit ago about really wanting to engage the medical community in partnership to help with these protections. Can you expand on that a little bit? What are your thoughts about how we as physicians who are working with the senior community, can be of support? DA Stephan: Well, I think that we're finding in a lot of our obstinate crimes or ones where the victims are especially vulnerable, that engaging the medical community is of really big value. And I've come at this through a 28-year journey of public safety and prosecution and working with vulnerable children, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and elder abuse. And we find that whenever you can get a well-educated and trained medical community to spot the warning signs, you can really do a lot better. It's something that I've done consistently in sexual trauma of having doctors really be able to detect that. In human trafficking, we are engaging the medical community on the warning signs of sex trafficking and human trafficking with our victims. And in domestic violence, we've done it for years to look for those telltale signs, document them, and engage police where necessary. But we've kinda left out the elder abuse area. And it is just as important if not more important. Seniors, generally they are so vulnerable to crime because their contacts with the community become less and less as they age. They're not showing up to work necessarily on a daily basis, they're not at school, so the regular places where people may spot those signs are not there. And so the ability ... But they often do still keep a medical appointment, or they have to be seen by a doctor for their eyes, or some issue with their health. And I feel, and my team of experts feel that that is a perfect opportunity to really touch base on the whole well-being of the senior, make sure that they are doing well. Really asking additional questions if there were signs of malnourishment or pain, it's incredible that amount of intersection that medical professionals can find. I mean we are ... Something as simple as even the pain killers or medications for some of our seniors that are suffering from cancer and different pain ailments is getting stolen by caretakers. And our seniors are left to stand for their pain. So that's just one thing. Sometimes they seem like their financial situation has really changed, and they're talking about moving from their home and poverty and things like that, that are also tell-tale signs. So we really believe that the medical engagement is gonna be critical. Dr. Bob: I can see that. I ...