Disability care providers in New Hampshire are sounding alarms about a shortage of state investigators looking into abuse, neglect, and exploitation within the adult developmental disability system, warning that months-long backlogs leave both residents and workers in prolonged uncertainty.
The concerns surfaced Thursday during a meeting of the state’s System Review Committee, held at the New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights in Concord. Three private care agency executives appeared on a panel to address persistent safety gaps, as the committee continues its review of problems uncovered by a series of investigative reports detailing rampant abuse, neglect, and untimely deaths across the state’s disability care network.
“There’s too few investigators,” said Michelle Donovan, New Hampshire director for the care agency Living Innovations. “Quite frankly, there’s not enough people to handle the amount of work. It sometimes takes up to six months to get results, which could leave someone hanging out there.”
When abuse, neglect, or exploitation allegations arise within New Hampshire’s system, investigators from either the Bureau of Adult and Aging Services or the Office of Client and Legal Services are assigned to look into the claims. The state contracts with private providers like Living Innovations to deliver residential care and day programming for adults with developmental disabilities. The understaffing problem means those investigations can drag on for months, with agencies caught in an awkward holding pattern in the meantime.
Donovan, who also serves as president of the Private Provider Network trade association, offered a specific example. Living Innovations filed a complaint against one of its employees on February 5. The Bureau of Adult and Aging Services did not respond until March 25, a gap of nearly seven weeks. Her agency takes immediate internal action before investigative results come back, she said, but the delay still leaves the employee “in jeopardy for that period of time.”
The timeline problem creates difficult situations for providers trying to follow state guidance. Rob Gillis, associate director of Monadnock Worksource in Peterborough, said his agency was notified about a complaint on December 10 that remains open. During that window, agencies are instructed to “safeguard the situation,” a directive Gillis said is far easier said than done.
“Typically, it is a situation that we respond to very quickly,” Gillis said. “But it is also a situation that is difficult sometimes, because what does ‘safeguard the situation’ mean, other than removing the person from their home who may not want to be removed from the home, and if it’s an unfounded situation, they were removed from the home without cause. And that, again, causes confusion and puts people in limbo, sometimes for an extended period of time.”
The stakes here are high on multiple sides. For residents with disabilities, drawn-out investigations mean potential continued exposure to an abusive worker or environment. For employees, an unresolved allegation creates professional and personal instability even when allegations ultimately prove unfounded. And for providers, the absence of a timely official finding strips them of the clear authority to act decisively.
The providers argued Thursday that increasing the number of state investigators would allow for faster resolutions across all of these scenarios. A quicker timeline would let agencies either terminate workers confirmed as abusive or restore the standing of those cleared, rather than leaving everyone suspended in an indeterminate state.
The System Review Committee has now convened multiple meetings in response to the investigative reporting that drew public and official attention to conditions inside the disability care system. Thursday’s session signals the committee is beginning to hear directly from the providers operating on the ground, not just reviewing records or hearing from state officials.
What Thursday’s hearing did not resolve is whether the state will actually allocate resources to hire additional investigators. That question will likely require action from the legislature or the relevant state agencies, neither of which made commitments during the panel session.
For care providers, the message is urgent. Months-long investigations are not an abstract bureaucratic inefficiency. They are a structural failure that puts vulnerable people and the workers meant to serve them at risk, in real time, every day an investigation sits unresolved.
