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The goal of integrated, multidisciplinary and person-centered care is on the welfare policy agenda in many countries, but how about integrated service delivery in action? This paper describes a three-year service journey of an elderly person from home to a nursing home through home care, specialized hospital and inpatient care. The aim of this viewpoint paper is to consider how customer orientation and integration are realized when an older lady living an active life becomes seriously ill and loses the ability to conduct daily functions.

The service path will be described from the perspective of a relative.

The paper raises questions related to governance as well as multidisciplinary and customer orientation in integrated care.

The paper discusses a real-life experience of an elderly care journey from active senior life to a nursing home in Finland. When making visible an elderly care journey, this gives real-life information about the challenges and the needs for development. Better practical understanding helps to remove inter-organizational barriers toward more integrated and patient safe care.

This paper investigates the relationship between health and labour market participation considering the potential role played by the presence of children and elderly persons (with/without disabilities) in Italian households.

The authors use longitudinal data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and full-information maximum likelihood to estimate a two-equation model (one equation for labour force participation and one for health status) with instruments to address the endogeneity of the labour force participation choice. The model is estimated separately by gender.

The authors find that while the presence of children, elderly persons or both is positively associated with the health status of both genders, the presence of disabled elderly persons exerts a negative role. As for participation, interesting differences emerge. The presence of children discourages women's participation but is positively associated with men's labour force participation. Interestingly, a caring role for elderly persons without disability emerges for both genders when the presence of children is combined with that of elderly people. Gender differences are also at work for the role of childcare services and elderly and/or disabled home care/assistance.

The findings indicate a possible caring role for elderly persons without disabilities, neutralizing the effect of the presence of children on the labour force participation of both genders. The results also suggest that greater coverage of care services should increase the active participation of women in the labour market.

The increasing size of the elderly population is emerging as a primary catalyst for the escalation of healthcare expenditure, and a sense of urgency is manifest. However, the complexity of the health- and elderly care systems provides challenges in improving system efficiency. Hence, the system-level understanding of the main obstacles to integration care needs further exploration. In order to better integrate health- and elderly care, the study needs to identify the actual misalignments underpinning the issue. This study provides the theoretical foundations for resource misalignments and provides empirical examples of these.

Semi-structured interviews with multiple stakeholders on various hierarchical levels were carried out to create a more complete view of the system and resources deployed in health- and elderly care. The application of user-centered design methods and co-creation with employees have also been crucial to the outcomes of the study.

Results show that health- and elderly care is a large-scale complex system. The overlapping and mutually reinforcing misalignments are: (1) regulation and policy differences, (2) stakeholder quantity and variation, (3) external control of health- and elderly care, (3) decreasing collaboration and (4) communication channels and IT development.

This qualitative study builds on institutional theory and resource integration theory and contributes with empirical descriptions of misalignments in the health- and elderly care system. These descriptions will serve as points of departure for systems design to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health- and elderly care.

This paper aims to introduce the Empatia video reflection method, designed to enhance care workers’ awareness of empathic care. The method makes the quality of care visible, which is needed when digitalization efforts in elder care focus on the efficiency and adequacy of care work.

The Empatia method leans on previous studies of the interaction between care professionals and clients and elaborates further previous video reflection methods. In empathic care work, the care worker sees the client on their life continuum, rather than focusing on only medical treatments.

The empirical example demonstrates how a care worker gained awareness of their empathic interaction habits. Within the work community, the reflection process sparked discussions on values: the purpose of care work and how to conduct empathic care. Focusing on empathic relationships in care fosters both the client’s and the care worker’s well-being.

The strength of the Empatia method is that it makes empathy visible in interaction and something that is individually and collectively learnable. The Empatia includes an analytical tool for researchers to reveal empathy in client interaction. It can be developed further into a reflection tool for service work to learn how to be empathic in service encounters.

Compared to other video-stimulated recall methods, the Empatia involves contextual understanding of care work. Empowering positive interactions instead of detecting errors and solving problems is a novel concept and is scantily used in studies of organizational learning. The Empatia provides a detailed method description that allows for the replication of the method by anyone.

Providing high-quality and cost-efficient care of older people is an important development priority for many health and social care systems in the world. This paper suggests a shift from acute, episodic and reactive hospital-centered care toward longitudinal, person-centered and proactive home-centered care. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge of a comprehensive development strategy for designing and providing home-centered care of older people.

The study design is based on qualitative research with an inductive approach. The authors study development initiatives at the national, regional and local levels of the Swedish health and social care system. The data collection methods included interviews (n = 54), meeting observations (n = 25) and document studies (n = 59).

The authors describe findings related to policy actions and system changes, attempts to achieve collaboration, integration and coordination, new forms of care offerings, characteristics of work settings at home and differences in patients' roles and participation at home and in the hospital.

The authors suggest home-centered care as a solution for providing person-centered and integrated care of older people and give examples of how this can be achieved.

The authors outline five propositions for research and development related to national policies, service modularity as a solution for customized and coordinated care, developing human resources and infrastructure for home settings, expanding services that enable older people living at home and patient co-creation.

This study aims to analyze the relationship between telework and teleworkers’ characteristics and the work-nonwork conflict (WNWC) in the Brazilian context, investigating time spent in eight nonwork dimensions and the more affected dimensions.

The study was quantitative and descriptive. A survey was conducted with 299 professionals’ teleworking in Brazil. Data analysis was conducted through descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation and analysis of variance.

Results show diversified interests other than work and family among teleworkers, variation within the affected nonwork dimensions in the WNWC, and that teleworkers’ WNWC is negatively associated with time flexibility and manager support and positively associated with individual preference for segmentation as a boundary management strategy.

The study highlights the need to include more nonwork aspects in telework studies to influence organizational practices. The main limitation is the nonprobabilistic sample.

Knowing more about teleworkers’ WNWC will help organizations improve lives by implementing practices and building a cultural environment that preserves nonwork time.

The study reinforces demands from new family arrangements and an aging society: organizations have to prepare to have teleworkers who want or need to dedicate time to interests besides family or children.

It progresses towards a broad understanding of nonwork besides family to understand teleworkers’ WNWC.

Studies on the work integration of persons with disabilities (PwD) and the role of social dialogue therein are scarce. The study examines how the different systems of workers’ representation and industrial relations in Slovakia and Norway facilitate PwD work integration. Taking a social ecosystem perspective, we acknowledge the role of various stakeholders and their interactions in supporting PwD work integration. The paper’s conceptual contribution lies in including social dialogue actors in this ecosystem.

Evidence was collected via desk research, 35 semi-structured in-depth interviews with 51 respondents and stakeholder workshops in 2019–2020.

The findings from Norway confirm the expected coordination of unions and employers in PwD work integration. Evidence from Slovakia shows that in decentralised industrial relations systems, institutional constraints beyond the workplace determine employers’ and worker representatives’ approaches in PwD integration. Most policy-level outcomes are contested, as integration occurs predominantly via sheltered workplaces without interest representation.

This paper identifies the primary sources of variation in the work integration of PwD. It also highlights opportunities for social partners across both situations to exercise agency and engagement to improve PwD work integration.

By integrating two streams of literature – social policy and welfare state and industrial relations – this paper examines PwD work integration from a social ecosystem perspective. Empirically, it offers novel qualitative comparative evidence on trade unions’ and employers’ roles in Slovakia and Norway.

This systematic review paper aims to investigate seasonal ambient change’s impact on the incidence of falls among older adults.

The population, exposure, outcome (PEO) structured framework was used to frame the research question prior to using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis framework. Three databases were searched, and a total of 12 studies were found for inclusion, and quality appraisal was carried out. Data extraction was performed, and narrative analysis was carried out.

Of the 12 studies, 2 found no link between seasonality and fall incidence. One study found fall rates increased during warmer months, and 9 of the 12 studies found that winter months and their associated seasonal changes led to an increase in the incidence in falls. The overall result was that cooler temperatures typically seen during winter months carried an increased risk of falling for older adults.

Additional research is needed, most likely examining the climate one lives in. However, the findings are relevant and can be used to inform health-care providers and older adults of the increased risk of falling during the winter.

Hazard risk communication has arguably been a challenge, especially in communities which are susceptible to multiple hazards. Orewa was specially chosen for this research in order to provide a complete assessment of the effectiveness of communicating New Zealand's early warning strategy in a multi-hazard area. Two categories of surveys were undertaken; experts and academics in emergency management and disaster risk resilience and the Orewa community. A semi-qualitative indicator-based analysis was conducted with the normalization of index values which resulted in four (4) categories; risk perception, risk awareness, risk governance and uncertainty, trust and credibility. The resulting vulnerability index indicated that risk perception and uncertainty, trust and credibility ranked the highest, followed by risk awareness and risk governance. Risk perception had stark differences between what the community perceives as being most at risk from to what the experts deem to be the highest risk for Orewa. This has implications for policy directives as well as funding for risk reduction. Uncertainty, trust and credibility was another area which indicated conflicting sentiments between the community and experts. The community generally trusts decision-makers but the experts think they don't. This shows that the community is aware of their risks, but may not necessarily believe that the experts are providing enough efforts in what is of importance to them. Risk governance is not a vulnerable area to the experts as they have been actively engaging in hazards that they deem Orewa was most at risk from. Any breakdown in communication can have detrimental effects if multiple hazards were to occur at once in the case of Orewa.