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This study aims to compare the level of needs for home-care robots amongst older adults, family caregivers and home-care staff and clarify the factors constituting these needs.

A cross-sectional, anonymous questionnaire survey was administered. It included 52 items related to needs for home-care robots rated on a four-point Likert scale. Means and standard deviations were calculated, and the Kruskal-Wallis test was performed for each item. Factor analysis was conducted on the needs of home-care staff.

Responses from 79 older adults, 54 family caregivers and 427 home-care staff were analysed. For all three groups, the level of agreement was high for the following needs: to inform family and support personnel immediately when older adults fall, about their location in case of natural disasters and about mismanagement of fire by older adults with dementia. For family caregivers and home-care staff, the level of need concerning monitoring was higher than for older adults. Extracted using factor analysis, the six factors representing the essential needs for home-care robots were risk minimisation, daily monitoring of the physical condition, supporting activities of daily living (ADL) and instrumental ADL, pre-empting problems, communication and miscellaneous support.

The results showed that the education of caregivers and the co-design process of robot development should involve home-care staff, older adults and family caregivers, which are important for making decisions about the use of home-care robots for older adults.

More and more people are receiving care while living in their own homes, a far greater number than are in residential and nursing home care, and in some cases with more complex needs. Yet there persists an image of home care as a very basic activity needing little or no training and in volving no career pr ogression. This image will have to change radically if registered providers are to meet the new national regulatory standards and if there is to be sufficient staff recruitment to meet the ever increasing demand for home care. This article sets out ways in which provider or ganisations can respond to these changes, particularly by building staff development and training strategies. Such strategies must recognise the growing importance and complexity of home care and take special account of the need for staff to gain vocational qualifications. Home care must be seen as offering professional career opportunities, not just a job. The article concludes that the future will lie in bringing care to the people who need it, rather than bringing people to the care.

Although there is some anecdotal evidence for the phenomenon of abuse and neglect of community‐dwelling older care recipients by home care services, empirical data on this topic are almost completely lacking in Germany. Thus the main purpose of this study was to determine scope and risk factors of abuse and neglect of older care recipients by nursing staff.

A self‐report study was conducted among home care nursing staff in the German city of Hanover. A total of 503 professional caregivers took part in the study; the response rate was 43.3 per cent.

Nearly 40 per cent of all respondents reported at least one incident of abuse or neglect of an older care recipient within the last 12 months. Psychological abuse/verbal aggression and neglect were most common. Serious problem behaviour can be predicted by care recipients’ aggressive behaviour, the number of a nurse's clients suffering from dementia, subjects’ use of alcohol as a means of alleviating work‐related stress, and general judgments of quality of care delivered by the respective home care service.

The study provides a first impression about the extent and potential causes of abuse and neglect by home care nursing staff. Findings show that the problem of abuse and neglect of care recipients is not limited to nursing homes and care by family members. The paper also points at opportunities for prevention and accentuates the need for further research in this field.

Adult social care services are increasingly establishing reablement services as part of their range of home care provision, sometimes alone, sometimes jointly with NHS partners. Typically, home care reablement is a short‐term intervention, often free of charge, that aims to maximise independent living skills. This paper describes two small studies examining the impact of home care reablement on subsequent service use. The evidence so far strongly suggests that a period of home care reablement can reduce the subsequent use of home care services and that, for some people, these benefits may last for a year or more. However, a number of organisational and cultural factors can limit the immediate and longer‐term benefits of home care reablement.

User-oriented care, defined as individualized assisting behaviors, is the dominant approach within elderly care today. Yet, there is little known about its conceptual structure. This paper proposes that user-oriented care has a bi-partite structure which may be decomposed into the two dimensions of task and relation.

Care workers were “shadowed” (i.e. observed) at their work (n=391 rated interactions). User-oriented care was assessed along ten process quality indicators targeting the acts of caregiving (i.e. task focus, relation focus, involvement, time-use, body language, autonomy, respect, warmth, encouragement, and information) in two elderly care settings, i.e. home care and nursing home. Observations added up to 45 hours.

Principal component analyses confirmed the proposed two-factor structure of user-oriented care. Specifically, the user-oriented care indicators loaded on two distinct factors, i.e. task and relation. The underlying structure of user-oriented care revealed to be invariant across the two settings. However, the results revealed interesting structural differences in terms of explained variance and the magnitude of factor loadings in the home care and nursing home settings. Differences also emerged specifically pertaining to the indicators of autonomy and time-use. These findings suggest that user-oriented behavior may to some extent denote different acts of caregiving and what may be called task- and relation-orientation may be loaded with different meanings in these two care settings.

This is the first study investigating user-oriented behavior in the context of elderly care using a quantitative observational approach. The authors propose that the observed differences between the two care settings are primarily not due to better elderly care work in home care, but due to some inherent differences between these two contexts of care (e.g. better health and living at home).

This is a case study of the contribution of independent researchers employed to obtain feedback on performance in home care services for a Best Value exercise in Luton. The authors report their findings and then speculate on how local authorities might enhance the process to achieve more informed consultation with service users.

This paper describes one aspect of research on domiciliary care in a Welsh authority, undertaken to assist in strategic planning of services. It goes on to explain the significance of the findings for the training of home care staff, and the development of standards which have been incorporated in a new accreditation scheme.

The purpose of this study is to understand health care providers' experiences with delivering a novel Integrated Care (IC) Program that co-ordinates hospital-based clinical services and home care for thoracic surgery patients, including perceptions on the provision of person-centred care and quality of work life.

The authors conducted a process evaluation using qualitative methods to understand provider experiences in the Integrated Care (IC) Program and to identify areas for programme improvement. Study data were collected using a focus group with thoracic surgeons, open-ended survey with home care providers, and semi-structured interviews with lead thoracic surgeons and IC leads, who are nurses serving as the primary point of contact for one consistent care team. Data were analysed using thematic analysis.

The IC Program was successful in supporting a partnership between health care providers and patients and caregivers to deliver a comprehensive and person-centred care experience. Informational continuity between providers was facilitated by IC leads and improved over time with greater professional integration and adaptation to the new care delivery processes. Differential impacts were found on quality of work life for providers in the IC Program.

This study describes provider experiences with delivering integrated and person-centred care across the hospital to home continuum, which can inform future integrated care initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of personalisation policy on the providers of social care services in England, mainly to older people, within the context of austerity and different conceptions of personalisation.

The paper draws on part of a longitudinal study of the care workforce, which involved 188 interviews with managers and staff, undertaken in two rounds.

Four themes were identified: changing understandings and awareness of personalisation; adapting services to fit new requirements; differences in contracting; and the impact on business viability.

The paper reflects a second look at the data focussing on a particular theme, which was not the focus of the research study. Furthermore, the data were gathered from self-selecting participants working in services in four contrasting areas, rather than a representative sample.

The research raises questions about the impact of a commercial model of “personalised care”, involving personal budgets (PBs) and spot contracts, on the stability of social care markets. Without a pluralistic, well-funded and vibrant social care market, it is hard to increase the consumer choice of services from a range of possible providers and, therefore, fulfil the government’s purposes for personalisation, particularly in a context of falling revenues from local authorities.

The research presents an analysis of interviews with care providers and care workers mainly working with older people. Their views on personalisation have not often been considered in contrast to the sizeable literature on PBs recipients and social workers.

The article addresses the issue of working carers in social services ‐ employees who have caring responsibilities for adults outside work. Where employers fail to support carers, costs can be high. Ways of developing carer‐friendly policies are considered