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Guardianship Improvement Task Force posts its final report

Senior Editor Top Stories

Guardianship Improvement Task ForceThe Guardianship Improvement Task Force has released a final report, complete with 10 recommendations, ranked by priority.

The 184-page report is posted on the task force webpage, https://guardianshipimprovementtaskforce.com/, and is the culmination of work that began when the Florida Court Clerks & Comptrollers assembled the panel last summer.

“This Task Force intends for the State of Florida’s guardianship laws and processes to be among the most protective and robust in the nation and recognizes that substantial and ongoing work is required to achieve this goal,” the executive summary concludes.

Task force members voted to approve the report at a November 15 meeting.

“The final report of the Guardianship Improvement Task Force is the product of the many diverse perspectives represented by its members, and I believe we accomplished what we set out to do from the start: to make recommendations for the Legislature’s consideration that will begin addressing the major issues with guardianships in our state,” Pinellas County Clerk of Court Ken Burke, the task force chair, said after the vote.

The task force included court clerks, court system employees who work with guardianships, lawyers (including representatives from the Bar’s Elder Law and Real Property, Probate and Trust Law sections), consumer advocates, a former ward, and others.

Task force member Gina Rossi-Scheiman, executive director of the Florida State Guardianship Association, cast the only vote against the final report.

Four months was not enough time to complete the mission, and some of the information presented to the task force was flawed or incomplete, Rossi-Scheiman contends.

“I did truly feel we didn’t have the time and the opportunity to go through the issues better and really put our heads together and make solid recommendations,” she said.

Bob Asztalos, deputy executive director of the Florida Department of Veterans’ Affairs, argued against a recommendation not to allow hospitals, nursing homes, and health-care facilitates to be involved in the selection of a guardian for their residents or patients.

“We have many residents in our veterans nursing homes, they have no family members, they’ve become estranged from their families, they have no community support because they’ve self-isolated. We are their family,” he said. “It’s not the nursing homes doing this to enrich themselves or make a profit off this, it is because we are their family at this point on….”

Task force member Rep. Colleen Burton, R-Lakeland, who chairs the House Health and Human Services Committee, abstained from voting because the recommendations are aimed at the Legislature. She predicted that lawmakers will consider the recommendations seriously.

“Everything that is in this report are things that quite frankly I have heard,” Burton said. “Now that we have something in writing — and the report you have done is extraordinary — we can share it with other members of the Legislature.”

The following are summaries of the 10 recommendations:

1) Create a statewide system for collecting data on all guardianship cases.

2) Adopt uniform guardianship forms to aid the data collection process.

3) Create a long-term entity, such as a task force or division within an agency, of individuals with “extensive guardianship knowledge and a broad range of perspectives” to make regular recommendations for legislative changes.

4) Offer more education, especially to the judiciary, regarding the preference that should be given to advance directives and other pre-need estate planning documents by the courts as less restrictive alternatives whenever available.

5) Create a statewide, publicly accessible database of professional guardians that tracks such things as qualifications, the number of wards assigned, and disciplinary history — and that immediately reports discipline or removals for cause to the relevant chief judge.

6) Require enhancements and improvements to all initial and continuing education requirements “for all parties and personnel in the guardianship process.”

7) Create a separate task force to review the practices and use of the guardianship system by health-care and residential care facilities and to explore alternatives to guardianship. Prohibit health-care and residential care facilities from recommending or pre-selecting a professional guardian for any patient or client in their care. Require providers who support a petition for guardianship for purposes of ongoing or a change of care for a patient or client to exhaust all available health-care surrogate and proxy options.

8) Approve, when appropriate, the use of supported decision making as an alternative to guardianship that must be considered by the court prior to appointing a guardian.

9) Require each judicial circuit to implement a guardian monitoring process.

10) Update and remove potentially prejudicial, outdated or pejorative language, such as “ward” or “alleged incapacitated person,” from the statutes.

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