Comparison of Paid versus Volunteer Multi-Disciplinary Teams in ProvidingCommunity-Based Care to Elder Abuse Victims

摘要

The research project was designed to examine the issues involved in implementingmulti-disciplinary elder abuse consultation teams (M-teams) to determine their impact on the services and outcomes of elder abuse victims. Two urban and two rural M-teams were established in Illinois. M-teams were composed of professionals from the following fields: medicine, mental health, finance, clergy, law enforcement and legal. The major hypotheses were that there would be no geographic differences implementing the teams, that voluntary teams would be more committed, and that workers who used the M-teams would report lower levels of burnout. The results rejected two of the three hypotheses. With regard to worker burnout, there were no differences between workers who used M-teams and those who did not. Also, there was no difference in committment based on paid or volunteer status.