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Care and support agendas have tended to focus on the need to develop effective services to meet individualised needs within communities of interest. In contrast, community development and regeneration policy have concentrated on the needs of the broader ‘community’ but with little regard to support and care. Rarely do these two important policy domains meet in practice. A three‐year pilot initiative, the Hull Community Care Development Project, aimed to develop the capacity of local communities to respond to their own support and ‘community care’ needs. An independent evaluation documented how such an approach could begin to bridge community and care, and how this produced new challenges, communities prioritising broad neighbourhood issues over specific care and support concerns.

The purpose of this study is to explore the support needs surrounding intimate relationships and sexuality of autistic adults accessing funded social care in England.

Semi-structured interviews with 15 autistic adults who were accessing funded social care examined their support needs surrounding intimate relationships and sexuality, with subsequent data analysis using reflexive thematic analysis.

Four themes were generated: Help at hand, but not too close for comfort, No “cookie-cutter rules”: personalised, inclusive approaches, Playing it safe, not leaving it too late, and Autism-informed education and support.

The authors produced an online learning module for social care staff in England on best practice in supporting autistic adults without learning disabilities with relationships and sexuality.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, there has been no other UK-based research published to date on the social care support needs of autistic adults without learning disabilities surrounding relationships, gender and sexuality.

This article describes the development of the Supported to Independent Living project (SIL), which is for the support and care for people with mental health needs in Oxfordshire to live as independently as possible in ordinary housing in the community. The project is a partnership between NHS Oxfordshire (Primary Care Trust), the Oxfordshire Supporting People programme and Oxfordshire County Council Social and Community Services.Although there was a very vigorous development of community living for people with longstanding mental health needs through the provision of group homes, particularly in Oxford City that started in 1963, there has not been an overall strategy for the development of mental health services for the County as a whole. The needs of a diverse, younger, often more mobile and potentially more challenging group of service users for housing with appropriate care and support have not been met.A joint strategy between the County Council and the Primary Care Trust (PCT) to meet these needs has therefore been developed that introduces a pathway of linked accommodation and support arrangements. These range from intensive support through to floating support in the community, and are intended to offer individuals a guided pathway away from specialist services to more mainstream provision. The services are based on the principles of recovery, personalisation and ordinary housing.As well as achieving significantly reconfigured services the strategy has to deliver savings to meet the cuts imposed on the Supporting People programme grant by Central Government.The project has involved the PCT and the County Council in close partnership working, and important and significant involvement of and engagement with service users and carers. A framework agreement has been agreed by all of the organisations involved. It sets out the roles and responsibilities of each and covers local government, the NHS, housing and support.

This study evaluates cross-national differences in public beliefs about the causes of health and the role of these beliefs in shaping attitudes regarding health policy.

The study uses data from the 2011 International Social Survey Program, which includes questions on health and health care, asked in 29 countries. Respondents were asked about four specific causes of poor health (i.e., genes, behavior, the environment, and poverty). Respondents were also asked about their attitudes regarding three aspects of health policy: their support for government-provided care, the perceived fairness of income disparities in medical treatment, and their support for providing health care to noncitizens.

The study has three findings. First, the study reveals the global reach of a multicausal view. The four beliefs about the causes of poor health are positively correlated in all countries. However, there is considerable cross-national variation in the average support for specific causes. Although in some countries proximate causes, such as genes, are endorsed more frequently than distal causes, such as poverty, this is by no means a uniform pattern. Support for genetic causes is high, but genetic reductionism is rare. Second, the study reveals that health beliefs are fundamentally political beliefs. The single most important determinant of beliefs about the causes of health is the country in which the respondent resides, exceeding in influence religion, education, and even personal experiences with health and health care. Third, the study reveals that the political connotations of health beliefs vary between countries, especially beliefs regarding genes. In general, those who endorse behavioral arguments favor less government involvement in health care and are more accepting of income disparities in the quality of care. Those who endorse the environment and poverty, meanwhile, tend to support a stronger role of government. Yet, the magnitude of these associations varies and, in the case of genetic arguments, even the direction of the association varies. Genetic arguments are frequently associated with support for a stronger role of government, but genetic arguments also are occasionally associated with support for the exclusion of noncitizens from the health care system.

International survey research is valuable for exploring the scope of patterns revealed in a limited set of countries, but it is difficult to pinpoint the source of cross-national differences.

The study demonstrates the importance of national context in shaping health beliefs, as well as the role of beliefs regarding the causes of health in setting the stage for public receptivity to government-provided care. The study also illustrates the value of thinking about beliefs about genes as reflecting larger projects of biocitizenship, at least in some countries.

The aim of this chapter is to explore changes since the COVID-19 pandemic in welfare policies and services for people with learning disabilities and autism in England, focusing mainly on educational and health and social care sectors.

A review of official policy documents published on GOV.UK from January 2020 to May 2021 has been conducted using keywords on the topic in question, and semi-structured interviews took place in 2022 with four key informants/stakeholders working in health and social care or education sectors of people with learning disability or autism in England.

The main findings indicate a need to shift practices online due to the pandemic, for both education and health and social-care practice. It is also clear that reforms and adjustments were implemented in guidance, policies and frameworks for the support of persons with learning disabilities and autism. It has been increasingly difficult for people with disabilities to access healthcare services and medication during the pandemic, and this has had an impact on their overall health and wellbeing too. Experts suggested that smoother changes and more support are required, in terms of provision of services, research, access to healthcare, educational services, mental health, employment, as well as more public funding on such services for people with learning disabilities and autism.

The main lessons learned were focusing on the use of online resources, digitalisation of services and access to them, but also difficulty of the system to adapt fast to major changes required in order to support people with disabilities.

Purpose: The aim is to explore how family relations are affected by societal changes in relation to informal and formal caregiving and self-determination of older adults.

Design/methodology/approach: Care managers (CMs)/social workers (SWs) (N = 124) participated in a comparative vignette study including Japan, South Korea, and Sweden. Systems theory was used.

Findings: Japanese CMs/SWs clearly describe their efforts to create networks in a relational way between formal and informal actors in the community. South Korean CMs/SWs balance between suggesting interventions to support daily life at home or a move to a nursing home, often acknowledging the family as the main caregiver. In Sweden, CMs/SWs highlight the juridical element in meeting the older adult and the interventions offered, and families primarily give social support. Regarding self-determination, the Japanese priority is for CMs/SWs to harmonize within the family and the community. South Korean CMs/SWs express ambivalent attitudes to older adults’ capability for self-determination in the intersection between formal and family care. Swedish CMs/SWs adhere to the older adult’s self-determination, while acknowledging the role of the family in persuading the older adult to accept interventions. The results suggest emerging defamilialization in South Korea, while tendencies to refamilialization are noticed in Japan and Sweden, albeit in different ways.

Research limitations/implications: In translation, nuances may be lost. A focus on changing families shows that country-specific details in care services have been reduced. For future research, perspectives of “care” need to be studied on different levels.

Originality/value: Using one vignette in three countries with different welfare regimes, discussing changing views on families’, communities’ and societal caregiving is unique. This captures changes in policy, influencing re- and defamilialization.

Hospitals within the United States consistently have injury rates that are over twice the national employee injury rate. Hospital safety studies typically investigate care providers rather than support service employees. Compounding the lack of evidence for this understudied population is the scant evidence that is available to examine the relationship of support service employees’ perceptions of safety and work-related injuries. To examine this phenomenon, the purpose of this study was to investigate support service employees’ perceptions of safety leadership and social support as well as the relationship of safety perception to levels of reported injuries.

A nonexperimental survey was conducted with the data collected from hospital support service employees (n=1,272) and examined: (1) relationships between safety leadership (supervisor and organization) and individual and unit safety perceptions; (2) the moderating effect of social support (supervisor and coworker) on individual and unit safety perceptions; and (3) the relationship of safety perception to reported injury rates. The survey items in this study were based on the items from the AHRQ Patient Safety Culture Survey and the U.S. National Health Care Surveys.

Safety leadership (supervisor and organization) was found to be positively related to individual safety perceptions and unit safety grade as was supervisor and coworker support. Coworker support was found to positively moderate the following relationships: supervisor safety leadership and safety perceptions, supervisor safety leadership and unit safety grade, and senior management safety leadership and safety perceptions. Positive employee safety perceptions were found to have a significant relationship with lower reported injury rates.

These findings suggest that safety leadership from supervisors and senior management as well as coworker support has positive implications for support service employees’ perceptions of safety, which, in turn, are negatively related to lower odds of reporting injuries.

Purpose: To explore emotional support, daily housework assistance, and economic support for older adults provided by the Vietnamese family within the context of the impacts of socio-economic, demographic, and other factors.

Methodology: (1) The researchers used data from censuses taken from 1989 to 2019; national surveys of Internal Migration, Labor and Employment and other topics; and recent large sample sociological surveys (2) adapted a modified Diamond Care Model (Ochiai, 2009) to analyze effects of the characteristics of older adults; and of the country’s laws, policies, and socio-economic changes, on the families’ caregiving activities supporting the older adults.

Findings: The family is still the most important institution providing care for older adults in Viet Nam. Most older people live with their children and see this as an age-old security solution despite differences related to lifestyles and interests. However, when the average number of working-age people per older person decreases, as older adults live longer, household sizes are smaller, and there is increased large migration, the demand for non-family caregiving for older adults will increase. Since social services to help meet this demand are limited, the traditional family support system for the elderly in Viet Nam will face many challenges as families try to assure the quality of care needed in the very near future.

Value: This chapter shows systematically a relationship between elderly care in the Vietnamese family and socio-economic, demographic, and associated factors based on comprehensive data sources. The results can help us think about how to create an appropriate future model for taking care of older adults in Viet Nam that combines the efforts of families and the support of comprehensive social policies by the community.

This paper aims to explore challenges and opportunities associated with young carers' employment in Australia.

Using a multi-stakeholder approach, this study captures the reflections of stakeholders (n = 8) and young carers (n = 10) about opportunities for, and experiences of, paid employment for young carers.

Despite many organisations internationally increasingly pushing diversity agendas and suggesting a commitment to equal opportunity experiences, this study found that young carers' work opportunities are often disrupted by their caring role. For young carers to be successful in their careers, organisations need to provide further workplace flexibility, and other support is required to attract and retain young carers into organisations and harness their transferrable skills for meaningful careers.

The paper highlights important implications for human resource management practitioners given the need to maximise the participation of young carers as workers, with benefits for young carers themselves, employers and society.

The research adds to the human resource management and work–family conflict literature in examining young carers through drawing on Conservation of Resources theory to highlight resources invested in caring leads to loss of educational and work experience resources. This leads to loss cycles and spirals, which can potentially continue across a lifetime, further contributing to disadvantage and lack of workplace and societal inclusion for this group of young people.