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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the Law Commission's recommendations concerning the power of removal contained in section 47 of the National Assistance Act 1948. That provision applies to certain people who are seriously ill, living in squalor, or not receiving proper care and it enables them to be taken to hospital or a care home and detained there.

The Law Commission's final report on adult social care law was considered and compared with earlier Commission publications that addressed this issue, and also with other sources (such as a paper published by the Department of Health in 2000).

The Law Commission calls for the repeal of section 47, because it is hard to interpret, difficult to implement and seems to breach the European Convention on Human Rights. The Commission says other provisions, such as those in environmental health legislation, the Mental Health Act 1983, and the Mental Capacity Act 2005, provide a more appropriate means of caring for people in distress and that more information is needed before a decision can be taken as to what, if anything, should replace section 47. Some of these criticisms, and also the call for more information, were made by the Department of Health.

The Law Commission's findings and recommendations concerning section 47 have not otherwise been widely reported, nor has much been done to analyse their development or antecedence. The paper also offers a modest critique of this aspect of the Commission's report.

This article discusses the Law Commission's proposals for the reform of adult social care, with a particular emphasis on the specific proposals relating to adult protection. It argues that a future adult social care statute should clarify the existing legal position by placing a duty on local social services authorities to make enquiries and take appropriate action in adult protection cases. The definition of an adult at risk for the purposes of the duty to investigate is also considered and a proposal is put forward for how this might be defined in the statute. The article also proposes that the compulsory removal power under section 47 of the National Assistance Act 1948 (HM Government, 1948) should be repealed, that adult safeguarding boards should be placed on a statutory footing and that duties to co‐operate in adult protection should be introduced. Finally, concerns are raised that the current lack of statutory provision for adult protection may mean that there is confusion over the precise legal status of the guidance No Secrets (Department of Health & Home Office, 2000) and In Safe Hands (Welsh Assembly Government, 2000) and what actions this can authorise.

Vulnerable adults have recently gained greater protection. A lot of attention has focused on the effect of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) and the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006, but many significant provisions can be found elsewhere. It may be that those provisions, and the possibilities they introduce, are not fully understood by those who could make the best use of them. That would be unfortunate. Where it enjoys powers for adult protection purposes, a public authority might have to explain any failure to use them, particularly where that failure has unfortunate consequences. This paper does not deal directly with the law on adult social care. Nor even, in general terms, does it describe the law relating to the safeguarding of vulnerable adults. It does, however, discuss some of the more significant adult protection provisions and in the process, refers to the No Secrets guidance, which was published in 2000 and remains the chief resource for adult protection work. (Department of Health & Home Office, 2000).

This paper originates from accessing the Cornwall Council website (Cornwall Council, 2010) in order to download the report of the serious case review into the murder of Steven Hoskin for teaching purposes on a Post‐Qualifying Social Work programme. However, there were another two serious case review reports posted, which were also relevant to the course. This reflective piece follows from a reading of the executive summary of one of them ‐ the Serious Case Review report into the death of JK (a 76‐year‐old female) in 2008 in Cornwall (Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Safeguarding Adults Board, 2009). While adult safeguarding is everybody's business, because of the original reason for accessing the report, the paper approaches the issues primarily from a social work perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to outline and critique the current model of adult safeguarding in Northern Ireland (NI).

The paper offers a critical analysis of adult safeguarding, legislation, policy and practice. Insights are offered from the Regional Adult Safeguarding Officer for NI, and available research evidence is cited.

Distinct features of Northern Irish society have shaped its adult safeguarding policy and practice in ways which differ from those in England, Scotland and Wales. The strengths and limitations of the legal and policy framework, and practice systems are discussed.

The paper offers the viewpoint of the authors, which may not be representative.

The potential advantages and challenges of the Northern Irish safeguarding systems are presented, and potential future developments are highlighted.

Changes have been highlighted in the way adult safeguarding has been conceptualised. An emphasis on prevention and early intervention activities, with a key role envisaged for community, voluntary and faith sector organisations, have been noted.

This paper provides an accessible overview of adult safeguarding in NI, which to date has been lacking from the literature.

This paper discusses the neglect of old people as an element of mistreatment. It considers the definition and prevalence of neglect and issues arising both in self‐neglect and in the context of professional and personal relationships. It is argued that the underlying reasons for ‘omissions of care’ are various and complex and that distinctions between ‘intentional’ and ‘unintentional’ neglect may be unhelpful. Present evidence suggests that it is the oldest and most vulnerable of elderly citizens who are most likely to experience neglect and that the numbers are not inconsiderable. This has far reaching implications for society and for many aspects of social policy and poses a moral challenge to us all.

The purpose of this paper is to set out the Law Commission's final recommendations for the reform of adult social care, with a particular emphasis on the recommendations for a new legal framework for adult safeguarding in England and Wales.

The paper discusses each of the Law Commission's recommendations for adult safeguarding and contrasts them with the proposals put forward at the consultation phase of the review.

The paper argues that a single legal framework for adult social care, including adult safeguarding, with have substantial benefits in terms of legal clarity, consistency and efficiency.

A clear and single legal framework is important for older and disabled people, and their carers, in order to understand fully their entitlements, and for local authorities and partnership agencies (such as the NHS and the police) in order to understand fully their responsibilities.

The paper provides a clear summary of the Law Commission's final report – in particular the recommendations for adult safeguarding.

Purpose: This report analyzes relationships between chronic inflammation and quality of life (QoL). It assesses the potential role of intimate relationships in associations between inflammation, medical sequelae such as pain and disability, and QoL.

Design/Methodology/Approach: Limited longitudinal data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) were analyzed. Inflammation was assessed via the biomarker C-reactive protein (CRP). The authors examined pathwise associations between CRP levels and general happiness. The authors used ordinal logistic regression with companion OLS models, and conducted a variety of sensitivity analyses.

Findings: Intimate partnerships – especially marriage – appear to impact associations between inflammation and QoL. When QoL is measured using general happiness, intimate relationships appear to shape directional associations between inflammation and QoL along with medical consequences of inflammation.

Research Limitations/Implications: Inflammation and its clinical consequences may substantially alter intimate relationship involvement and quality that in turn impact QoL. These relationships should not be viewed as unilateral explanations of the tremendous variability observed in QoL among people with inflammatory conditions, but rather as possible elements of complex causal frameworks. Further investigation using advanced methods for longitudinal modeling from limited waves of data can help to shed additional light on the nuances of happiness and QoL among people living with chronic inflammation.

Originality/Value: This chapter provides an overview of possible causal relationships between chronic inflammation, associated clinical and social experiences, and QoL. Researchers interested in advanced causal modeling of relationships between chronic inflammation and QoL can build on this work using novel methods and data sources.

Previous dynamic prediction models rarely handle multi-period data with different intervals, and the large-scale patient hospital records are not effectively used to improve the prediction performance. This paper aims to focus on the prediction of cardiovascular disease using the improved long short-term memory (LSTM) model.

A new model based on the traditional LSTM was proposed to predict cardiovascular disease. The irregular time interval is smoothed to obtain the time parameter vector, and it is used as the input of the forgetting gate of LSTM to overcome the prediction obstacle caused by the irregular time interval.

The experimental results show that the dynamic prediction model proposed in this paper obtained a significant better classification performance compared with the traditional LSTM model.

In this paper, the authors improved the LSTM by smoothing the irregular time between different medical stages of the patient to obtain the temporal feature vector.

Illness narratives provide a useful lens for analysing neoliberal citizenship at a micro level, from the point of view of patients, family caregivers and healthcare professionals. Indeed, they reveal how people think about and act on their health and disease; they also tell us something about the social context in which illness is experienced, thereby illuminating dominant discourses.

According to Mol (2008), health and illness can be thought about and acted on according to two logics: the logic of choice and the logic of care. The logic of choice entails the neoliberal principle that people should be allowed to make their own autonomous choices. The logic of care implies an interpersonal process of co-responsibility over one’s health and illness.

Drawing on Mol’s work, the chapter presents a thematic content analysis of 20 illness narratives of patients with multiple sclerosis and their caregivers, questioning whether these two logics conflict with each other or whether they are intertwined.