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The purpose of this paper is to describe the benefits of a social prescribing service for older people with sensory impairments experiencing social isolation. The paper draws on the findings from a 12-week programme run by Sense, a voluntary sector organisation, and illustrates how integrated services, combining arts-based participation and voluntary sector support, can create positive health and wellbeing outcomes for older people.

The research took a mixed-methodological approach, conducting and analysing data from interviews and dynamic observation proformas with facilitators and quantitative psychological wellbeing scores with participants throughout the course of the programme. Observations and case study data were also collected to complement and contextualise the data sets.

The research found that participatory arts programmes can help combat social isolation amongst older people with sensory impairments and can offer an important alliance for social care providers who are required to reach more people under increasing pecuniary pressures. The research also highlights other benefits for health and wellbeing in the group including increased self-confidence, new friendships, increased mental wellbeing and reduced social isolation.

The research was based on a sample size of 12 people with sensory impairments and therefore may lack generalisability. However, similar outcomes for people engaging in participatory arts through social prescription are documented elsewhere in the literature.

The paper includes implications for existing health and social care services and argues that delivering more integrated services that combine health and social care pathways with arts provision have the potential to create social and medical health benefits without being care/support resource heavy.

This paper fulfils a need to understand and develop services that are beneficial to older people who become sensory impaired in later life. This cohort is growing and, at present, there are very few services for this community at high risk of social isolation.

Researchers who work in partnership with older adults in participatory studies often experience various advantages, but also complex ethical questions or even encounter obstacles during the research process. This paper aims to provide insights into the value of an intersectional lens in participatory research to understand how power plays out within a mixed research team of academic and community co-researchers.

Four academic researchers reflected in a case-study approach in a dialogical way on two critical case examples with the most learning potential by written dialogical and via face-to-face meetings in duos or trios. This study used an intersectionality-informed analysis.

This study shows that the intersectional lens helped the authors to understand the interactions of key players in the study and their different social locations. Intersections of age, gender, ethnicity/class and professional status stood out as categories in conflict. In hindsight, forms of privilege and oppression became more apparent. The authors also understood that they reproduced traditional power dynamics within the group of co-researchers and between academic and community co-researchers that did not match their mission for horizontal relations. This study showed that academics, although they wanted to work toward social inclusion and equality, were bystanders and people who reproduced power relations at several crucial moments. This was disempowering for certain older individuals and social groups and marginalized their voices and interests.

Till now, not many scholars wrote in-depth about race- and age-related tensions in partnerships in participatory action research or related approaches, especially not about tensions in research with older people.

Although much can be learned from schools that regularly foster deeper learning, little research has been undertaken into how and why these schools have been effective or to elucidate key leadership and cultural characteristics. Moreover, there has been limited attention toward deeper learning within schools that focus on career and technical education (CTE), a major omission given the potentially elevated potential for deeper learning in these contexts. This study aims to partially rectify these issues by examining the intersections of leadership and culture at an innovative school that has demonstrated excellence whilst providing a curriculum centered on CTE.

This instrumental, insider, single-case study is focused on how leadership–cultural interactions have fostered and shaped students' opportunities to experience deeper learning. The authors take the perspective that it is largely through these leadership–cultural intersections that an organization and the work that happens within it takes on a particular meaning, direction and value. This study applies ethnographic methods, drawing upon formally and informally collected data over the past three years – e.g. from field notes, from leadership meetings and site visits; focus group interviews with students, parents, teachers, partners and school leaders; and additional artifacts.

The authors detail three interrelated features at this school, noting that it is: (1) driven by moral purpose; (2) open, collaborative and trusting; and (3) ambitious and entrepreneurial. The authors explain how/why such a culture has developed and to what effects, especially in relation to facilitating deeper learning.

Study findings meaningfully add to the literature regarding leadership for deeper learning, broadly and in relation to career and technical education and yield recommendations for educational leaders and policymakers.

This article attempts to match the future needs of older people with the possibilities arising from applications based on new technology.

This article examines the implications of novel applications for active ageing policy. These applications are forecast to arise from the convergence of two or more previously separated science disciplines and technologies, including information and communication technologies, nanotechnologies, biotechnology and cognitive sciences.

Research on converging applications (CA) is largely driven by health applications, and is likely to spill over into the older generation's specific needs. Today, older people's most urgent needs require little CA. In the future, however, the role of CA will become more important as technology develops and is more widely used.

Owing to demographic change and its expected social and economic implications, there is a need to investigate how upcoming applications could contribute to the future specific needs of the older population.

This paper aims to examine the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in the knowledge creation practices adopted by a health care organization. The organization is delivering care to patients of a genetic disorder, called the sickle cell, in tribal communities. The paper identifies how ICT intermediates knowledge creation practices across the organizational boundaries wherein tribal patients, front-line counselors and expert physicians interact, which then produces context-specific, evidence-based medicine (EBM).

The knowledge-in-practice approach is adopted to conduct an ethnographic study of sickle cell care practices in a non-profit health care organization in Western India. The analysis focuses on ICT-mediated interactional practices among the physicians, front-line counselors, tribal patients and their families, for more than a year-long observation. These are supplemented with informal and formal interviews, archival records and vignettes based on several episodes to explicate the key knowledge creation practices.

Technology-mediated informative interactions at organizational boundaries can bridge socio-linguistic and interpretive barriers between actors, while also providing a generative structure that leads to the creation of longitudinal clinical evidence about a rare genetic disorder. Three specific ICT-entwined knowledge creation practices emerge, namely, knowing the community, increasing interactional engagement and constructing gradients of socio-clinical history. These practices generate organization-wide knowledge about the social and clinical dimensions of the genetic disorder. The findings are presented through vignettes and a novel conceptual framework.

This study identifies various useful knowledge creation practices in health care delivery for resource-constrained emerging economy contexts. Further, the study suggests that the involvement of local front-line actors and ICT can become important resources in the delivery of health care in these settings.

A novel framework is developed which demonstrates knowledge creation at organizational boundaries wherein the actors use ICT-based practices for effective delivery of health care. The proposed framework may be used by health care organizations in similar contexts providing care to marginalized communities.

Are entrepreneurial opportunities discovered or created? The debate around this question has crucial implications for successful organizational change management in the business world. The present conceptual paper transcends this debate by embedding the concept of the entrepreneurial opportunities within a Luhmannian systems – theoretical framework which accentuates the unique role of organization and change in the age of functional differentiation. The purpose of this paper is to show how the strategic navigation of the borders between function systems such as politics, science, education, religion, art, or, of course, economy leads to the discovery or creation new opportunities for both business and social entrepreneurship.

The paper combines Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social differentiation with Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy. The key argument is that the alternative regimes of social differentiation, such as segmentation, centralization, stratification, and functional differentiation, create distinct pools of entrepreneurial opportunities to be discovered, created, and exploited by adequate business models. (Business) Organizations, therefore, need to strategically adjust the amount of attention they devote to the different forms of social differentiation. The argument is buttressed with illustrative examples of business models related to the regime of functional differentiation.

A paradoxical finding is that the multifunctional business models which explicitly draw on the value creation potential of the most recent form of social differentiation, functional differentiation, remain little known even though they infuse business organizations with a unique capacity of new venture discovery and creation in the modern society.

Multifunctional business models have so far remained unexplored in entrepreneurship theory and practice. This paper develops a first strategic approach to the discovery or creation of both multifunctional business models and a broader framework of multifunctional organization models.

The main objective of the study is to analyse the perception of accessibility to cultural for different age groups (children, teenagers, adults and seniors) in the city of Novi Sad (Serbia). Additional goals were to reveal which cultural contents in the city are the most important to which particular age group and to measure the level of compatibility with their needs.

The study sample consisted of 170 respondents of different age groups used for comparison purposes. Data were collected through an online questionnaire and analysed by IBM SPSS Statistics (descriptive statistical analysis and ANOVA test).

The results of this research showed that a gap is evident between the current cultural offer and the needs and preferences of visitors of different age groups. One of the significant obstacles that emerged is the inadequate promotion of cultural contents in the city to different age groups of visitors (children, teenagers, adults and seniors). The study also identified the age groups of visitors to whom the cultural offer was least adapted, as well as mapping the cultural institutions which are least accessible to audiences of different ages.

The paper addresses the knowledge gap related to accessibility to cultural for different generations. It focuses on topics that have not been previously researched – comparison of the needs of different generations concerning the actual offer in cultural institutions, addressing the importance of certain elements of a cultural offer to different age groups and the level of accessibility of such features to different age groups.

The purpose of this study is to explore how vulnerable healthcare consumers foster social support through visual storytelling in social media in navigating healthcare consumption experiences.

This study employs a dual qualitative approach of visual and textual analysis of 180 Instagram posts from female breast cancer patients and survivors who use the platform to narrate their healthcare consumption experiences.

This study demonstrates how visual storytelling on social media normalises hidden aspects of healthcare consumption experiences through healthcare disclosures (procedural, corporeal, recovery), normalising practices (providing learning resources, cohering the illness experience, problematising mainstream recovery narratives) and enabling digital affordances, which in turn facilitates social support among vulnerable healthcare consumers.

This study highlights the potential for visual storytelling on social media to address shortcomings in the healthcare service system and contribute to societal well-being through co-creative efforts that offer real-time and customised support for vulnerable healthcare consumers.

This research highlights that visual storytelling on image-based social media offers transformative possibilities for vulnerable healthcare consumers seeking social support in negotiating the challenges of their healthcare consumption experiences.

This study presents a framework of visual storytelling for vulnerable healthcare consumers on image-based social media. Our paper offers three key contributions: that visual storytelling fosters informational and companionship social support for vulnerable healthcare consumers; recognising this occurs through normalising hidden healthcare consumption experiences; and identifying healthcare disclosures, normalising practices and enabling digital affordances as fundamental to this process.

This paper aims to provide clear domain knowledge and recent progresses on electronic healthcare (e-healthcare).

In this paper, the authors use citation analysis to describe the trends of study on e-health with the help of CiteSpace II, a software for visualizing citation-based analysis. By analyzing the 2,752 publications and their citation data in ISI database, the authors proposed renewable figures and tables on ranking critical people, institutes, keywords and journals. Through the most influential articles given by CiteSpace, the authors can grasp the main direction in e-health researches. Furthermore, the authors analyzed the literature at e-health literacy as a case, to better understand the development of research viewpoints.

Through the analysis, the authors found that e-health is a multi-disciplinary research field and the major research about it has changed. During the early stage, health information quality on the Internet dominates. Gradually, the role of information technology (IT) becomes more important. The authors also found that some researchers, recently, have proposed the effects of IT on e-health literacy which can then improve the ability to use health information on the Internet.

This paper has some research limitations, such as using an ISI database with most English publications. The future research may be conducted for collecting local publications data in China. It also has some implications. Based on the results, the authors claimed that IT may significantly improve people’s healthcare variance, e.g. e-health literacy. It is necessary to build new IT-based healthcare theories.

This paper also has some practical implications. Practitioners and institute may easily come to know which are the hot topics, top institutes and tendencies in the e-healthcare field.

This paper may help practitioners to find common interests with other institutions and societies.

This paper reported the status and trend of research in this field visually, and the result will help researchers to do more in-depth research in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the first stage of an innovative developmental study addressing the educational and emotional needs of dementia care home staff using arts-based materials.

The arts workshop was developed using a mixed methods approach. This included ethnographic observation within a dementia care home, in-depth interviews with senior care home managers, a thematic analysis of focus groups and the development of a comic. At all stages, the multi-disciplinary project team collaborated closely with the care home staff. A comprehensive literature review of the policy, practice and academic background to dementia workforce education provided a contextual framework for the study. Perspectives from the medical humanities informed the project.

Despite the high prevalence of people living with dementia in care homes, there is a lack of appropriate training for the workforce that provides their care. This study found that an arts-based workshop offering an interactive mode of education was an effective way to engage this workforce. The workshop empowered participants to recognise their skills and focus on person-centred care; reflecting current recommendations for dementia care.

The workshop was delivered in a single dementia care home and therefore findings may not be generalisable. In addition, the management did not take a direct part in the delivery of the workshop and therefore their views are not included in this study.

The arts-based approach can offer a means of engaging the dementia care workforce in education linked to their experience of caring.

The paper identifies the gap in relevant education for the dementia care workforce and outlines one possible way of addressing this gap using the arts.