Is Elder Abuse Associated with Recent Health Care Utilization? Analysis of a New Zealand national dataset

Elder abuse (EA) remains largely undetected and unreported. The international Resident Assessment Instrument (interRAI) is a suite of assessment instruments that may serve as a convenience screening for EA. In Aotearoa New Zealand interRAI is mandatory in community services for older people. We analysed a comprehensive national interRAI-HC (Home Care) dataset focusing on Health Care utilization outcomes of EA. Nine years of interRAI-HC data (2013 – 2022) encompassing 186,713 individual assessments demonstrated suspected victims of EA had lower rates of any of the predefined outcomes apart from Emergency Department (ED) visits (where there was no difference). For acute general hospitals admissions (GH) rates in the last 90 days were significantly lower than those of the general cohort (39.9% vs 47.7% respectively; χ2=114.4, p