Training

Originally, the conference was held in San Antonio, Texas in concert with the Texas state APS conference. However, since1999, the NAPSA conference has been held at different locations around the country, in order to provide APS professionals in the region with the opportunity to attend the conference without incurring significant travel expenses. Recently, NAPSA conferences have been held in Nashville, TN; Scottsdale, AZ; Washington, DC; Chicago, Il and Portland, ME. In 2005 the conference will be in Salt Lake City, UT and in 2006 in San Francisco, CA. If your state is interested in hosting a future NAPSA conference, please contact us.

Over the years, conference attendance has expanded from fifty to two hundred participants. Conference programs have featured national experts on a wide variety of topics including Building Alliances with Tribal Nations; Investigations Involving People with Mental Disabilities; Domestic Violence Advocates as Mandatory Reporters to APS; Elder Abuse Fatality Teams; Quality Assurance and Forensic Interviewing.

Support for the conference comes from registration fees, a grant the U.S. Administration on Aging, donations from states hosting the conferences, and private foundations such as the Archstone Foundation. The NAPSA Conference Planning Committee, made up of APS volunteers, has the responsibility for conference planning. Planning activities typically begin the month after the most recent conference, and increase in intensity as the next conference date approaches. While many organizations use professional conference planners, NAPSA has been fortunate to have a number of highly skilled committee members who design conference materials, select conference speakers, organize social events and make sure that each event runs smoothly. NAPSA conferences have consistently been rated in the above average to excellent range. If you are a member of NAPSA and interested in joining the Conference Committee, please contact Anne Kincaid at anne.kincaid@apsnetwork.org.

Through its partnership in the National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA), NAPSA has also developed a number of training materials, To access these materials, please visit our publications page.

NAPSA also provides a National Library of Adult Protective Services Training Materials as part of its NCEA affiliation. Through a contract with the REFT Institute, Inc., NAPSA has collected a large selection of training curricula, videos and Power Point presentations. Most of these materials are available on loan at no cost. To read descriptions of the library holdings, as well as how to submit materials to the library and how to borrow them, go to the Training Library page.

Also as part of the NCEA, NAPSA has developed a set of Core Competencies for Adult Protective Services. A Power Point presentation on the development of these competencies, as well as the competencies themselves may be accessed by clicking on our publications page. The competencies will be used to develop a series of APS training modules that will be available nation-wide.