A Study on the Financial Security of Persons with Dementia and Dementia Friendly Community

Background: At the end of 2017, the population of dementia in Taiwan has exceeded 270,000, and related legal issues have also appeared. People who have dementia are not only unable to deal with their own finances due to their decline in judgment, but also vulnerable to the risk of property infringement or fraud. Under the global goal of promoting a “dementia-friendly community”, previous research has shown that financial industry employees play a key role in detecting financial abuse, and can prevent improper use of funds by senior customers by means of bystander intervention. Objectives: The first aim is to explore financial abuse problems that elderly people with cognitive impairment may face and the various causes of financial abuse. The second aim is to explore how to improve dementia friendliness and knowledge about financial abuse among banking professionals. The project also seeks to increase the detection of financial abuse and corresponding actions taken by banking professionals. Their ability to make decisions regarding financial abuse could prevent future incidents occurs in elders with suspected dementia. Methods: The first part of this project will financial ombudsman report and court rulings and to search for keywords including “dementia”, “bank”, “finance” to categorize type of financial abuse problems of people with dementia and the impact on the rights to the victim. For the second part of this project, we will recruit 500 bank front line staffs to conduct case vignettes surveys. We seek to examine the decision of bank professionals and to identify case features in suspected incidences of financial abuse, and whether any precaution measures can be taken to reduce the financial loss of customers with dementia.Expected results: This project will use analysis of court rulings to find out type of financial abuse problems that elderly people with dementia may face, and examine the effectiveness of the bystander intervention model in preventing financial abuse of persons with dementia through questionnaire survey. We expect to provide recommendations to the financial industry to develop “Industry Guidelines for Handling Customers Who Lack Mental Capacity”, and help Taiwan to become a more dementia-friendly society.