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The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of a comprehensive and independent study of 1,029 older people who receive home care in Wales. The study aims to expand knowledge on the views of older people, a group who traditionally have struggled to make their voices heard. It asked older people about six specific components of home care: being listened to; having trained, knowledgeable and skilled care workers; having enough time to be cared for; receiving care from as few different workers as possible; receiving quality care; and being signposted to other sources of information.

After an initial literature review and period of analysis, a thematic framework for home care was developed which contained the six components described above. A questionnaire was subsequently designed and distributed via the post to all home care services over 65 years old in four local authorities across Wales. A sample response rate of 26.7 per cent was achieved.

The paper provides evidence on the levels of satisfaction (or otherwise) with the home care received by older people in Wales. Overall, nearly 85 per cent of older people are either “satisfied” or “very satisfied”, and given the sample size these data are significant (within appropriate confidence intervals) for the whole of the 25,000 people who receive home care in Wales. However, it is difficult to contextualise these findings given that there are no effective comparator data.

Given the chosen research approach, the results may lack a certain depth of understanding. That said, the size of the sample does provide commissioners and providers of services with certainty about the general population view.

This paper offers a unique independent analysis of home care in Wales, and provides the reader with detailed insights into the views of older people who rarely get a chance to be heard.

Through the lens afforded by two theories drawn from the discipline of social psychology, the purpose of this paper is to explain the evident continuing abuse of adults at risk living in care homes by the staff who should be looking after them.

By considering existing theories and research into the reasons why vulnerable adults are abused the paper proposes the relevance of other extant theories on the degradation of moral restraint and dehumanisation of victims, and on the social psychology of intergroup relations, to the perpetration of abuse.

The paper demonstrates how theories that explain the psychology of human behaviour in certain circumstances may be usefully applied to the inveterate social problem of the abuse of vulnerable adults living in care homes.

The paper offers the opportunity for the reader to consider how these theories of social psychology may be applied to explain and guide remedies to the persistent levels of abuse in English care homes, abuse that continues despite government oversight of care provided to adults who may be at risk by virtue of the activities of the statutory regulator and health and social care commissioners, and the interventions of safeguarding personnel.

This is a conceptual paper from which future research and theorising may arise to better understand the most fundamental causes of the abuse of older people in care homes in order to develop feasible and effective measures to overcome it.

The purpose of this study is to examine inter‐generational arrangements in Thailand for personal care provided to older members and provided by them as grandparents to young children.

Results are based on analysis of the 2007 Survey of Older Persons in Thailand. Consideration focuses on persons aged 60 and older.

The results document the primary role of the family, especially adult children and spouses, in providing personal care to older members. For those with only one or two adult children compared to those with four or more, spouses are considerably more likely and children less likely to be the main care provider. At the same time, older family members, as grandparents, make significant contributions to the care of young children, especially for those whose parents migrated. In most such situations, however, the grandchild's parents cover the main financial support.

Trends towards smaller family size and increased migration of adult children have already contributed to a steady decline in coresidence with adult children and increased proportions of older persons living alone or only with a spouse. How this will affect elder and grandchild care requires careful monitoring to guide social policy in relation to the roles of family, state, and voluntary sector.

The availability of representative data on the older population in Thailand provides an unusual opportunity to highlight the challenges posed by the changing demographic context of inter‐generational family care in a context of rapid population ageing in a developing country setting.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how migration affects the care of older people in Italy.

The paper is based on anthropological fieldwork by one of the authors. This consisted of in-depth interviews with 20 “badanti” (migrant caregivers), with relatives of older people and with social workers in the city of Verona, Italy. It further included extensive study of secondary materials on the topic of migrant care of older people.

Badanti, Italian families and older people find themselves locked in an uneasy contract: badanti because they are exploited and often unable to find better, formal employment; Italian families because they are aware that they fail to render their moral duty to their aged parents and grandparents; and older people because they feel neglected and maltreated by their children. Yet the three parties also rely on each other to make the best of a precarious situation. The relationship between badanti and Italian elderly highlights the contradictions within Italian politics on care and migration. This case study shows how migrants help Italian families to hold on to the tradition of family care for ageing parents.

The small sample of badanti and families provides a detailed and profound insight of the complexity of elder care in Italy but does not allow generalisation for developments in the country as a whole.

Policy makers should take notice of the indispensability of informal migrant care in present day Italy.

The originality of the paper lies in the in-depth conversations with badanti and in the way in which elderly care is contextualised in the Italian tradition of care and present day politics.

Re-abling care of frail older people is highly on the agenda in several countries. The purpose of this paper is to have a closer look at the argumentation used for its establishment by local policy actors in the field and the kind of expectations towards the behaviour of frail older people it entails.

The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with 17 local policy actors in two Danish municipalities. The interviews have been analysed with the help of argumentative discourse analysis.

The most important argument for re-abling care appears to be grounded in economic reasons. However, a second, moral argument was found revolving around the older peoples’ activity, which contributes to the establishment of moral expectations towards frail older people to be active.

As the goal of the study was to analyse understandings and values of key local actors, the implementation of re-ablement programmes and the users’ perspective were not studied.

The paper contributes to the investigation of the shift from universal entitlement as a right to towards market rationalities in Danish elder care.

The objective of the research reported here was to provide an opportunity to raise issues relevant to the ongoing debate on informal care of older people by exploring the attitudes of both men and women towards the care of dependent older people. The sample (n = 174) was drawn from age cohorts 20‐39 years (n = 90) and 40‐59 years (n = 84). The men and women who participated in the study were members of the general public. The self‐administered survey questionnaire was designed to examine attitudes towards the informal care of older people and to determine if men and women differ not only in attitude but also in their willingness to undertake certain aspects of care, and whether the age of the respondent was likely to be a defining factor. Statistical analysis was conducted using SPSS. The results established that an overwhelming majority of women demonstrated a greater willingness to provide care to a dependent older relative.

Considering the views of service users is important to identify their needs as this helps providers to develop appropriate and responsive services. For older people receiving home care, recognising their needs is the first step towards supporting them to maintain independence and promote wellbeing. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A systematic review was conducted in 2014 to explore the personal experiences of older people in England about the care and support they received at home. Studies published between 2004 and 2013 were identified from bibliographic databases and websites. A total of 17 studies satisfied the inclusion criteria. Data were extracted using a standardised coding tool and narratively synthesised. Study quality was evaluated.

Nine themes were identified. Older people valued an approach that was person centred, flexible and proactive to respond to their changing needs and priorities, focusing on what they can or would like to do to maintain their independence. Allowing time to build trust between older people and their care workers helped to realise older peoples’ aspirations and goals. Practical help to promote choice and reduce social isolation was perceived to be as important as personal care.

Evidence from this review contributed to the development of a social care guideline on home care, and informed key practice recommendations for care providers in England.

This review highlighted the value older people place in person-centred care incorporating practical help both inside and outside the realm of personal care.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study to explore the experience of dignity in the acute care of older people in four acute NHS trusts. It explores the prevalent view that acute care is not the right place for older people and the failure to acknowledge that the largest group of users are the very old, the frail and the dependent, which results in environments that are not friendly to older people generally, and are especially hostile to those with cognitive impairments. Added to this, a culture that is risk averse and defensive, where care is undervalued and where professional accountability and discretion are replaced by standardised checklists, pathways and audits, cultivates the attitude that if an aspect of care can't be measured it doesn't matter. Overall, getting the job done appears to matter more than how the job is done, so that the focus is primarily on the task rather than seeing the person. It describes how the failure of acute trusts to respond to the needs of the majority of their users ‐ older people ‐ results in the failure to provide dignified care and the impact of this on both the quality of care and patient outcomes.

This study aims to evaluate whether employees consider employer‐sponsored elder‐care programs to benefit aging family members and whether those programs help employees with caregiving needs, stay productively employed.

A nationwide internet‐based survey was conducted between December 2008 and May 2009, eliciting information from 447 users of employer‐sponsored elder‐care services. Survey participants were employed individuals who had requested assistance from one of five national elder‐care service provider organizations (SPOs) during the preceding two years.

A majority of respondents reported that the services helped them to keep working productively (74.0 percent), avoid job absences (65.5 percent), stay employed (58.0 percent), and maintain a good family life at home (72.1 percent). Respondents were generally satisfied with the services provided by SPOs. However, most respondents did not feel that the services help minimize caregiving expenses.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first US study evaluating the usefulness of employer elder‐care programs, based on the perspectives of employees who have used the programs.

Older people are often perceived to be a drain on health care resources. This ignores their caring contribution to the health care sector. The purpose of this paper is to address this imbalance and highlight the role of older people as carers.

The study uses a unique data set supplied by a charity. It covers 1,985 caregivers, their characteristics, type and amount of care provided and the characteristics and needs of those cared-for. Binary and ordered logistic regression is used to examine determinates of the supply of care. Fairlie-Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions are used to disentangle the extent to which differences in the supply of care by age are due to observable endowment effects or coefficient effects. Nationally representative British Household Panel Survey data provide contextualization.

Older caregivers are more intensive carers, caring for longer hours, providing more co-residential and personal care. They are therefore more likely to be in greater need of assistance. The decompositions show that their more intensive caring contribution is partly explained by the largely exogenous characteristics and needs of the people they care for.

The data are regional and constrained by the supplier's design.

Older carers make a significant contribution to health care provision. Their allocation of time to caregiving is not a free choice, it is constrained by the needs of those cared-for.

If the burden of care and caring contribution are measured by hours supplied and provision of intimate personal care, then a case is made that older carers experience the greatest burden and contribute the most to the community.