Any form of abuse of the elderly is completely unacceptable, and the government will adopt a policy of zero tolerance if such cases come to light, the Parliamentary Secretary for the Elderly said yesterday.

Addressing a hastily announced news conference at the Social Policy Ministry in Valletta, Justyne Caruana noted that since 2010 there had been over 1,000 reports of abuse on the elderly.

Parliamentary Secretary Justyne Caruana said monitoring had been improved at homes for the elderly. Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

Apart from physical and emotional abuse, a lot of the cases involved financial exploitation of old people, she said.

“There is no place for rotten apples, and the government will adopt all necessary measures to combat this abuse.”

The parliamentary secretary said the news conference was called in the wake of the furore fuelled by allegations that a nursing aide had physically abused a 92-year-old patient at St Vincent de Paul Residence.

The accused nursing aide, who had been arraigned in court a couple of hours before, pleaded not guilty.

“Now is the right time to raise awareness that this is not the only case, as other cases of abuse are also being perpetrated by relatives,” Dr Caruana said.

She said she was mostly hurt by social cases in hospitals and homes involving old people who had been abandoned or neglected by their children.

There is no place for rotten apples, and the government will adopt all necessary measures to combat this abuse

She noted that recent amendments to the law had widened the definition of abuse and introduced harsher penalties for the perpetrators.

Asked if there was currently enough supervision in homes, she pointed out that a number of standard operational procedures had been introduced to improve monitoring.

Dr Caruana said that thanks, to these measures, a number of abuses had been flagged but declined to give any details.