A Somerset County woman claims a policy at the county's Agency on Aging is putting elderly residents - like her mother - in danger.

Tammy Emerick was forced to look to the county for financial aid when her mother's Alzheimer's got to be too much for her family to handle.

Her family doctor recommended that Tammy's mom, Janet, be put into a locked facility. But the county agency disagreed and instead placed her in a personal care home. Janet was removed after just 25 hours after she tried to escape and become violent.

"I'm not out to get the AAA," said Emerick, of Meyersdale. "I'm out to get this fixed."

Emerick said she was outraged after a caseworker overruled her ailing mother's doctor. She then took matters into her own hands, and wrote letters to everyone from the top down trying to get the county's policy on level of care placements changed.

"I tried fighting this all the way up through the state level and was just told the AAA overrules the physicians," Emerick said.

Somerset County commissioner Brad Cober received one of Tammy's letters. He too wanted answers on the AAA's policy. In response, Cover, went directly to administrators for a copy of the agency's placement policies.

"I said, 'Well where's our written procedures? Do we have a written policy? And we didn't," Cober said.

Art DiLoretto, who runs Somerset's AAA, said since the State Department of Public Welfare contracts the AAA to do assessments, his agency follows the state's placement guidelines. Those practices, DiLoretto said, are based on two principles elderly Pennsylvanians have demanded.

"We want to make sure that we can remain as independent as possible and we want to make sure if the government intervenes, that it's in the least intrusive way," DiLoretto said.

But Emerick argued her mother was in no state of mind to know what was best for her.

After Channel 6 News began this investigation, commissioners received a newly-written policy on the level of care procedures from DiLoretto. That policy included a requirement that the agency contact the patient's doctor before making a ruling on how a patient should be placed.

Cober said, "If there's still a disagreement, that would give that attending physician an opportunity for one last chance to convince our physician there's an error in his judgment."

DiLoretto said, "It shows our commitment to communicate, to support, to be sensitive to this issue, and that's what we're about here."

The new protocol also calls for an AAA administrator to get involved earlier in the assessment process to review the case if there are still disagreements between the patient's doctor and the AAA's evaluation.

"In those instances when a family member says, 'We want you to take a second look,' that's what we do because not that the DPW tells us to ... (but) because that's what's right," DiLoretto said.

Emerick said she's only halfway through her mission. In Somerset County, the protocol has now been written and is in place, but it still doesn't include any changes that would prevent the AAA from overruling a patient's doctor.

And, according to Cober, that's the way it's going to stay.

Cober said, "As I told Tammy, if she really wants to change this where an LPN or a consulting physician (doesn't) override the attending physician, then the DPW needs to pull us out of the mix."