That's a good question.
Under the public health component of the federal elder abuse initiative, we did undertake to develop a number of resources. I'll break them down into two categories.
One is tools or resources that could help a front-line worker such as a doctor or a social worker be able to better identify what the risks of abuse are and what it looks like. Once they know that, what do they do about it? How do they connect the abused to services and support in their community, and how do they have that discussion with them? So there were resources that are for those folks.
We've also developed resources that are for the community at large, such as looking at the issue of elder abuse as a societal responsibility. For example, how would a neighbour be able to address a concern that Mrs. Jones next door may be experiencing some form of abuse or neglect? How would I as that neighbour be able to address that? What information do I need? That's very intimidating. It's scary. You're worried about repercussions. How could I navigate that to best support my neighbour? At the end of the day, what you're trying to do is help the senior who is potentially going through that issue. We've developed resources that would look to support that.
Those are the resource types and the audiences—if you will—that we've targeted. We've also worked with health professionals and, more to the point, key researchers in the field, such as Dr. Mark Yaffe from McGill University, to help develop better screening tools to support our front-line workers, in particular physicians, in being able to identify their suspicion of abuse. He's come up with a very clever indicator of six questions called EASI, which is elder abuse suspicion index. You may have heard of it.
It's six or seven key questions that a physician can ask a patient very gently and very quickly to get a sense of whether that person is in a position of risk. There's that, and then as mentioned and alluded to by Marla, we have also done some work that looked at the gender-based analysis, because if you're going to target resources you need to know something about the population you're targeting. It's extremely important, because depending on the type of abuse you're dealing with and the sex being abused, the type of thing that you develop becomes very different. It can take very, very different forms.
That's the overall range of the issues we looked at. Over a very short period of time we tried to focus on key targets, and again, on health professionals and other front-line workers—the way I would describe it—who would be in a place to see abuse happening. We also looked at societal role and responsibility.