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The purpose of the scoping review is to develop understandings around the high demand for in-home healthcare for the aged and how to find ways to better support declining numbers of in-home care workers and healthcare professionals. The scoping review highlights the role of human resource management (HRM) in this sector.

This scoping review of literature takes a systematic approach to identify themes on the aged care sector and levels of support for in-home care. We map the literature from specific databases to find themes.

It is important for HRM of aged care service providers to understand the key issues around homecare workers and healthcare professionals. There are key issues for stakeholders, such as clients’ health needs, organizations struggling to recruit and retain healthcare workers, and it is critical to know how such issues impact on clients and the healthcare workforce.

There is a dearth of literature on in-home care for the aged, and therefore, we contribute to understandings about the competing pressures surrounding the demand for in-home care versus the declining number of homecare workers and professional healthcare workers in this sector. We highlight the lack of HRM support from aged care providers and the impact on homecare workers.

Support workers who provide in‐home support to people with psychiatric disability are becoming a significant part of the mental health workforce. Research is needed to establish the optimum level and content of training they need to effectively carry out their role.

This paper reports on this paper is to draw on the results of a survey of 104 support workers and interviews with 18 support workers and eight managers in Queensland, Australia, who provide in‐home support for people with psychiatric disability. The authors describe the training undertaken by these workers and their perceptions of the adequacy of this training in relation to the challenges of their work.

The majority of support workers felt they had adequate training, though many expressed the desire to know more about mental illness symptoms, medications and the concept of recovery. Support workers nominated motivating their clients and managing challenging behaviour as the most difficult aspect of the job. Future training offered to these workers needs to focus on increasing knowledge about mental illness and the concept of recovery, and supporting them in their work with clients who have low levels of motivation and/or challenging behaviours. Access to professional supervision may also be of benefit.

This paper adds to knowledge about the training needs of support workers who provide in‐home support to people with psychiatric disability. These findings will be useful for practitioners and decision makers who are considering the training needs of this group.

This study has conceptualized and empirically investigated how the psychological empowerment process is generated from a patient's cognitive knowledge and participation at different recovery places that results in a state of empowerment and predicts positive outcomes.

Data were collected from 150 physiotherapy outpatients who have been attending a series of physiotherapy courses at clinic and concurrently progressing with home physio exercise plan. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with SmartPLS software.

The results reveal that psychological empowerment best formed when patient centric knowledge is combined with place-based behavioral experiences that are gathered via healthcare encounters and experience patient gained outside of the clinic. Patients' involvement at different environmental settings contributes to patients' empowerment which further assists their well-being.

Understanding the process of empowerment in different environmental contexts can help healthcare organizations to better design patient empowerment strategies and support patients through the empowerment journey to demonstrate their capability to achieve more effective health recovery outcomes.

Patient empowerment is a concept of growing importance in the healthcare industry, yet the journey about how patients are being empowered within their sphere has not been well studied in the past. To the authors' knowledge, this study is the first study that discusses the utilization of patient empowerment must be aimed at both the process and the outcomes. This study provides empirical insights to understand the factors that formulate patient empowerment and predicts positive patient outcomes such as feelings of well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of stress between work intensification and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) focusing on personal support workers (PSWs) in home and community care.

The analysis sample of 922 comes from the 2015 survey of PSWs employed in Ontario, Canada. The endogenous variable is self-reported MSDs, and the exogenous variable is work intensification. Stress, measured as symptoms of stress, is the mediating variable. Other factors shown in the literature as associated with stress and/or MSDs are included as control variables. Structural equation model regression analyses are presented.

The results show that stress mediates the effect of work intensification on PSW’s MSDs. Other significant factors included being injured in the past year, facing hazards at work and preferring less hours – all had positive and significant substantive effects on MSDs.

The survey is cross-sectional and not longitudinal or experimental in design, and it focuses on a single occupation in a single sector in Ontario, Canada and, as such, this can limit the generalizability of the results to other occupations and sectors.

For PSW employers including their human resource managers, supervisors, schedulers and policy-makers, the study recommends reducing work intensification to lower stress levels and MSDs.

The findings of this study contribute to the theory and knowledge by providing evidence on how work intensification can affect workers’ health and assist decision makers in taking actions to create healthy work environments.

Earlier Nordic comparative studies show variation between countries in child welfare practice, reflecting cultural differences, and that case workers share the norms, values and attitudes of their society. Can cultural factors be concretised for discussion? Child welfare workers in Denmark, Iceland and Norway were presented with five child care stories (vignettes) that focused on the ‘threshold’ between preventive measures and out‐of‐home care (consensual or compulsory). Vignette themes included parental neglect, maternal alcohol misuse and youth problems. Study participants gave written answers to the vignettes and took part in group discussions with colleagues. The results showed significant differences between countries in case workers' responses. Variations in arguments, decisions, use of compulsion and working style reflected national views and priorities. A central dimension was how case workers balanced parental interests with children's needs: in Denmark they were reluctant to intervene with parental rights, whereas the Norwegians were more accepting of compulsory decisions to protect children.

This paper aims to examine communication channels for in‐home service provision. In particular, it aims to focus on the joint effect of two converging trends: the increase of in‐home services involving high degrees of customer participation;and the extension of the number of channels that service firms use to communicate with customers. It seeks to assess which benefits customers desire of communication channels across in‐home service production formats and how these benefit desires determine their communication channel consideration for in‐home services.

Based on a literature review a conceptual framework was constructed. Using the association pattern technique (APT), a survey of 383 customers of a Dutch energy company was carried out. The APT enabled the authors to quantify the relationship between participative in‐home service provision situations, desired communication channel benefits, and communication channel consideration.

Results show that customers focus more strongly on functionally‐ and economically‐oriented communication channel benefits in high customer participation service formats. In contrast, socially‐oriented communication channel benefits seem more appropriate when low customer participation in the provision of in‐home services is involved. The match between benefits desired by the customer and benefits provided by a communication channel is identified as a central mechanism behind communication channel consideration for in‐home services. Furthermore, evidence is found for customer heterogeneity in desired communication channel benefits and channel consideration, based on age, education, and past channel usage.

This paper contributes to the multichannel knowledge base by hypothesizing and demonstrating how specific benefit desires arise from allowing/requiring customers to participate in in‐home service provision. The study also provides valuable insight into the mechanism behind communication channel consideration by customers during in‐home service provision.

Many writers assume that consumers’ use of the Internet will follow the development of Web sites by Realtor.com and other Realtor‐sponsored sites on the Internet. This study examined this proposition by surveying consumers’ Internet use in their home purchases. A model of consumers’ Internet use in home purchases is developed and tested. Results showed that fewer than 40 percent of the home purchasers ever used the Internet for real estate related information during their home purchases. Awareness of Internet real estate information, access to Internet, age, perceived effectiveness of Internet in home purchase, and satisfaction with Realtor are found to be important factors in determining consumers’ use of Internet during home purchases.

This study aims to investigate the collaboration processes of immigrant families as they search for online information together. Immigrant English-language learning adults of lower socioeconomic status often work collaboratively with their children to search the internet. Family members rely on each other’s language and digital literacy skills in this collaborative process known as online search and brokering (OSB). While previous work has identified ecological factors that impact OSB, research has not yet distilled the specific learning processes behind such collaborations.

For this study, the authors adhere to practices of a case study examination. This study’s participants included parents, grandparents and children aged 10–17 years. Most adults were born in Mexico, did not have a college-degree, worked in service industries and represented a lower-SES population. This study conducted two to three separate in-home family visits per family with interviews and online search tasks.

From a case study analysis of three families, this paper explores the funds of knowledge, resilience, ecological support and challenges that children and parents face, as they engage in collaborative OSB experiences. This study demonstrates how in-home computer-supported collaborative processes are often informal, social, emotional and highly relevant to solving information challenges.

An intergenerational OSB process is different from collaborative online information problem-solving that happens between classroom peers or coworkers. This study’s research shows how both parents and children draw on their funds of knowledge, resilience and ecological support systems when they search collaboratively, with and for their family members, to problem solve. This is a case study of three families working in collaboration with each other. This case study informs analytical generalizations and theory-building rather than statistical generalizations about families.

Designers need to recognize that children and youth are using the same tools as adults to seek high-level critical information. This study’s model suggests that if parents and children are negotiating information seeking with the same technology tools but different funds of knowledge, experience levels and skills, the presentation of information (e.g. online search results, information visualizations) needs to accommodate different levels of understanding. This study recommends designers work closely with marginalized communities through participatory design methods to better understand how interfaces and visuals can help accommodate youth invisible work.

The authors have demonstrated in this study that learning and engaging in family online searching is not only vital to the development of individual and digital literacy skills, it is a part of family learning. While community services, libraries and schools have a responsibility to support individual digital and information literacy development, this study’s model highlights the need to recognize funds of knowledge, family resiliency and asset-based learning. Schools and teachers should identify and harness youth invisible work as a form of learning at home. The authors believe educators can do this by highlighting the importance of information problem solving in homes and youth in their families. Libraries and community centers also play a critical role in supporting parents and adults for technical assistance (e.g. WiFi access) and information resources.

This study’s work indicates new conditions fostering productive joint media engagement (JME) around OSB. This study contributes a generative understanding that promotes studying and designing for JME, where family responsibility is the focus.

The paper aims to investigate the key components of facilities management (FM) in care and attention (C & A) homes from the end users’ perspective based on a post-occupancy evaluation method. Hong Kong is a rapidly ageing society. Elderly population may reach 24.3 per cent in the next 20 years, causing an increase in the demand for care services. Therefore, it is necessary to provide sufficient and satisfactory residential C & A homes with appropriate facilities for our elderly.

To collect subjective data from end users, a questionnaire survey was conducted in 119 respondents consisting of both elderly residents and staff of the C & A homes. To further understand the actual situations, site measurements were also used to collect the objective data from the representative homes.

The results indicate that three aspects of key FM components, namely, architect, building services and supporting, all have significant relationships with the overall satisfaction. The site measurements further revealed the actual environment of the seven C & A homes, especially the contrasts between homes with highest scores (Homes E and F) and lowest scores (B and D).

To provide a clear picture to the government and construction professionals, a number of practical recommendations were proposed, such as sufficient space with single or couple bedrooms, sufficient corridor width for two people in wheelchairs and white or pink as the colour scheme in architectural aspect; sufficient lighting, central air conditioning system and adequate quantities of natural fresh air in the building service aspect; and frequently updated menus, door lock and CCTV system for supporting facilities.

This paper applied site measurement on the representative homes to cross-check the quantitative results. The findings of this study can assist architects and facilities managers in C & A homes to improve FM services during the design and operational stages for improving the satisfaction levels of elderly residents.