The Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging has received an award of $131,000 from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation to offer trainings for lawyers and social workers to preserve the rights of vulnerable adults while ensuring their timely access to necessary health treatment.
Brookdale’s partners in this project to train professionals in hospitals and clinics include Judge Kristin Booth Glen (director of Supported Decision-Making New York and dean emerita of the CUNY School of Law) and the New York Legal Assistance Group, a nonprofit provider of legal services and financial counseling.
This project will address the problem that advocates for patients—attorneys, social workers, and court personnel—are not aware of all of the existing legal options to provide needed medical services when an individual is unable to direct their own care. Lawyers and social workers will receive practical guidance for applying “the least restrictive alternative” possible under the law, streamlining assistance for individuals who need support while retaining their autonomy and dignity.
Brookdale will develop a curriculum and conduct trainings especially targeting New York Legal Assistance Group attorneys and social workers and administrators already working in New York City-area hospitals and clinics, as well as court personnel in the City’s five boroughs. By familiarizing people with a special, more limited provision of guardianship, Article 81.16(b), some of the heavy-handed, default fixes may be replaced with streamlined practical remedies to offer less costly, less time-consuming solutions for the people and institutions involved, preserving rights and treating at-risk patients with much-deserved compassion and respect.
