This incident may have happened in WI, but can occur Anywhere USA: http://www.jsonline.com/features/health/111504319.html

Milwaukee police were dispatched more than 380 times to nursing homes during the first six months of 2010, a figure that shocked even those activists and officials who deal with older adults.

Not all of the calls were related to resident behavior, but the figure appears to point to a growing dilemma of how nursing homes deal with combative patients who suffer from Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia.

"These numbers are outrageous. A lot of attention has not been paid," said Stephanie Sue Stein, director of the Milwaukee County Department on Aging.

"We were surprised to see the scope of it and also reports that in some cases nursing homes are filing some charges against some residents," said Tom Hlavacek, executive director of the Alzheimer's Association of Southeastern Wisconsin.

Christine Kovach, a professor in the college of nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will release the figure Wednesday as part of testimony in Washington, D.C., at a U.S. Senate forum led by U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.).

The figure Kovach will provide is in a report, soon to be released, by an Alzheimer's Association task force in the Milwaukee area. That group was set up following the March death of Richard Petersen, an Alzheimer's patient who had exhibited symptoms that included irritability, yelling and hitting.

During the last weeks of his life, Petersen was shuttled between the Luther Manor senior facility in Wauwatosa, three hospitals and the Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Division.

His death galvanized portions of the area's medical and legal communities and sparked an initiative to find out how often police were being called to nursing homes.

So far, the task force has obtained numbers from the city from January through June of this year. In some cases, calls were made by nursing home personnel to police because of such things as suspected theft or the spotting of a suspicious person on the premises.

More than half the calls came from two police districts with concentrations of nursing homes - District 1, which includes downtown and the east side, and District 4, on the northwest side.

In 14 cases, police initiated an "emergency detention" proceeding under Chapter 51.15. The legal statute enables police to take into custody those thought to be mentally ill with a "substantial probability" of causing harm to themselves or others.

The Police Department, which assisted the task force, declined to comment until the full report is released.

A range of experts are due Wednesday to speak to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging forum called ""Until There's A Cure: How to Help Alzheimer's Patients and Families NOW." The discussion will focus on ways to improve care for Alzheimer's patients.

Kovach, an expert in helping nursing staff deal with patients who have dementia, will describe ways to train front-line nursing staff to better manage pain, infection, agitation and other unmet needs of Alzheimer's patients. Her testimony will describe a program that is designed to stop the inappropriate use of psychotropic drugs for Alzheimer's patients.

She wants the program, tested in 14 nursing homes in the Milwaukee area, to be used across the country. The program, known as Serial Trial Intervention, helps staff better interpret and deal with behavior of dementia patients.

For two decades, Kovach has been engrossed by the subject, ever since she worked at a care facility in Rochester, N.Y., helping a patient with end-stage dementia who lapsed into speaking Yiddish and often screamed out. It was only after the patient's death, and an autopsy, that doctors discovered the patient had cancer.

"We knew we had failed," Kovach said. "We had interpreted her behavior as psychiatric rather than physical."