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The undervaluing of care work, whether conducted informally or formally, has long been subject to debate. While much discussion, and indeed reform has centred on childcare, there is a growing need, particularly in countries with ageing populations, to examine how long-term care (LTC) work is valued. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the way in which employment policies (female labour market participation, retirement age, and precarious work) and social policies (care entitlements and benefits/leave for carers) affect both informal carers and formal care workers in a liberal welfare state with a rapidly ageing population.

Drawing the adult worker model the authors use the existing literature on ageing care and employment to examine the approach of a liberal welfare state to care work focusing on both supports for informal carers and job quality in the formal care sector.

The research suggests that employment policies advocating increased labour participation, delaying retirement and treating informal care as a form of welfare are at odds with LTC strategies which encourage informal care. Furthermore, the latter policy acts to devalue formal care roles in an economic sense and potentially discourages workers from entering the formal care sector.

To date research investigating the interplay between employment and LTC policies has focused on either informal or formal care workers. In combining both aspects, we view informal and formal care workers as complementary, interdependent agents in the care process. This underlines the need to develop social policy regarding care and employment which encompasses the needs of each group concurrently.

This paper is the first in a series that will examine the management of innovation by cross‐functional, multi‐disciplinary patient care teams in a palliative care environment. This highly innovative environment is singularly focused on relieving the suffering of patients and their socially related carers during an end of life experience. The singular focus enables and encourages palliative care practitioners to break through and diminish or accommodate professionally‐based paradigm conflicts and organisational politics. This facilitates collaborative team‐based efforts, including the patient and the patient’s social support group, to address the multi‐causal uncertainties that characterise end of life in palliative care. The continuous innovation model used in the European Union funded CIMA project is used as a starting point for this research. While many businesses have struggled to implement self‐regulating teams and have invested considerable resources in attempting to gain some advantage from teamwork it appears palliative care professionals have adopted self‐regulating work teams in a highly uncertain environment as the most suitable human resource structure and practice.

Telecare is a new form of assistive technology that has the potential to offer benefits to a wide range of stakeholders including the service user, informal carers and formal care services. It is a complex intervention, combining selected items of technology and telecommunications equipment in combination with conventional community services in order to support independent living. An overview of a robust evaluation framework is presented that will enable services to be compared from several viewpoints. It also offers a means of considering individual service elements and their integration into an effective service delivering cost benefits to the health and social care economies as well as improved quality of life to service users.

Two projects in the EQUAL programme explore aspects of the influence of building design on the quality of life of people with dementia. Design in Caring Environments (DICE) examined the quality of life of people in residential care homes in relation to building design features. INDEPENDENT (Investigating Enabling Environments for People with Dementia) is a current project with the aim of developing technologies to enhance quality of life by supporting enjoyable activities. One aspect of INDEPENDENT is an exploration of the interaction between spatial settings and meaningful activity, to highlight factors that support and enable activity and to identify barriers. Findings from both projects suggest that a more creative approach to the management of buildings would enhance the well‐being of residents; under‐use of facilities is common. Meaningful space that supports activity is therapeutic but spaces that give confused messages are common in buildings used by older people. Tools to evaluate buildings have a potential role in the long‐term management of facilities to help identify underused spaces, spatial confusion and barriers to activity. Quality of life was shown to be poorer in buildings that prioritise safety and health; buildings that support activity positively by providing good assistive devices, giving people control of their environment and affording good links with the community have a positive association with well‐being.

Policy has identified the need for integrated dementia services for older people. However, the role of the formal carer within an integrated framework of service delivery has not been well articulated in practice. The aim of this paper is to understand the experiences of formal carers working with the context of an integrated dementia service by exploring findings from a research‐based evaluation.

The evaluation captured the experiences of formal carers working within the service via observations, semi‐structured interviews and focus groups.

Working with an integrated service brings about individual, social and organisational challenges to the role of the formal carer, in terms of: delivering flexibility and responsiveness, providing continuity of care, ensuring cross‐organisational working and acquiring skills, knowledge and expertise.

To facilitate the successful delivery of integrated care, the emerging role of the formal carer needs to be more clearly articulated and supported within a service context.

This paper examines the involvement in the TATE [Through Assistive Technology to Employment] Project of people with learning disabilities who were beneficiaries of that project. TATE was a three‐year research project funded through the Equal Community Programme, which finished in December 2007. The beneficiaries of TATE were involved in all aspects of the project from management to advising about the actual assistive technology devices they believed would increase their independence and remove barriers to employment.

There are clear theoretical, policy and practice tensions in conceptualising social or long-term care as a “right”: an enforceable choice. The purpose of this article is to address the following questions: Do disabled and older citizens have the right to long-term care? What do these rights look like under different care regimes? Do citizens have the right or duty to *provide* long-term care? It is already known that both formal and informal care across all welfare contexts is mainly provided by women and that this has serious implications for gender equality.

In this article, the author takes a conceptual approach to examining the comparative evidence from developed welfare states with formal long-term care provision and the different models of care, to challenge feminist care theory from the perspective of those living in care poverty (i.e. with insufficient access to long-term care and support to meet their citizenship rights).

Drawing on her own comparative research on models of long-term and “personalised” care, the author finds that different models of state provision and different models of personalised care provide differential citizenship outcomes for carers and those needing care. The findings indicate that well-governed personalised long-term care provides the best outcomes in terms of balancing potentially conflicting citizenship claims and addressing care poverty.

The author develops new approaches to care theory based on citizenship and care poverty that have not been published elsewhere, drawing on models that she developed herself.