Combating elder abuse: the role of guardians for older people in residential care

The preparation of this paper was prompted by publicity and research evidence of neglect/abuse of older persons in residential care. It sets out to present a new way of combating neglect/abuse of individual residents, drawing also on preliminary findings from a longterm research project on guardianship. This project, provisionally entitled Guardianship Relations: Models for ground rules, looks at the situations of all vulnerable persons irrespective of settings whereas the following notes concentrate on the need for guardians for persons who reside in homes for the elderly (residential care homes/RCHs).