Proposed legislation needed to address sensitive issue

Editor’s note: Another Viewpoint is a column The News-Herald makes available so all sides of an issue may be aired. Tom Fields lives in Mentor.

I have called upon legislators in Ohio and elsewhere to sponsor the legislation introduced in this column.

This legislation responds to several well-known facts about the financial exploitation of the cognitive impairments exhibited by many older adults, including:

• Squabbles over transfers of wealth, including inheritances, often involve claims that the transferer’s deteriorated condition was exploited by the transferee.

• Too often these claims cannot be reliably decided because the transferer is not alive or well enough to answer the questions which need to be asked.

• The high cost of prosecuting/litigating these claims is itself often exploited by abusers who feel they risk nothing more than what they’ve illicitly gained.

This legislation would establish a two-checklist protocol that is required to ensure that the evidence which is needed to quickly, inexpensively and reliably decide these claims is collected at the time and in the manner which it needs to be collected.

One of these checklists is a financial decision screening scale that was created sometime around 2013 by Wayne State University’s Dr. Peter Lichtenberg for just such purposes. A copy of Lichtenberg scale’s is included in the one-page handout at http://tvfields.com/Lichtenberg.pdf.

The other checklist complements existing mandatory reporting laws to ensure that Lichtenberg’s scale is employed when and how it most needs to be employed.

This alert-triggering checklist identifies situations that it would be reasonable for a mandatory reporter to report.

These are situations like that which is recorded by the threeminute video from an ABC News report that is also included in the handout.

What follows is an example of how the protocol works.

This example is based upon the case recorded by the threeminute video.

In this case, a lawyer and two of his clients visit a stroke victim in a hospital’s emergency room for the purpose of getting the patient to sign over her property to themselves.

The proposed legislation would meet the needs mentioned above by requiring training for lawyers on the protocol and their obligation to:

• Meet with the hospital’s risk manager (or other designated hospital representative) BEFORE conducting such business with a patient.

• Identify for the risk manager the patient whom he intends to visit.

The proposed legislation also would require training for hospital risk managers on the protocol and their obligation to check the patient’s hospital records to see if the patient is in any of the conditions listed by the alert-triggering checklist, and if so, BEFORE allowing these visitors to visit the patient:

• Interview the patient, following strict forensic standards, using Lichtenberg’s scale.

• Notify Adult Protective Services and any other appropriate individuals and/or agencies.

The required training is of paramount importance.

It is needed so that the everyone knows their responsibility, which is necessary if those who neglect it are going to be held accountable.

The training and obligation required of the lawyer in the above example can similarly be required of others, including professional guardians as well as family members appointed by the court as guardians or granted by the court powers of attorney.

The costs associated with implementing this protocol could be recovered by charging the patients whose interests it protects a small service fee that would be practically nothing compared with the cost of prosecuting/litigating matters which the evidence collected by this protocol could quickly settle.

This service fee could be based upon the time that a risk manager would reasonably need to satisfy his obligations.

Readers who recognize the need for such safeguards would be doing everyone a service by encouraging members of the legislature to follow up the direction provided in this column.