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The purpose of this paper is to provide an exploratory account of the links between devolution, homelessness and health in the UK. Specifically, it focusses on the policy context and governance structures that shape the systems of healthcare for homeless people in London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Empirically the paper draws on semi-structured interviews with a small sample of policy and practice actors from the devolved territories. Qualitative interviews were supplemented by a comparative policy analysis of the homelessness and health agenda within the devolved regions. Theoretically, it takes inspiration from Chaney’s concept of the “issue salience of homelessness” and explores the comparative character of healthcare as pertains to homeless people across the devolved territories.

The paper provides clear evidence of areas of divergence and convergence in policy and practice between the devolved regions. These features are shown to be strongly mediated by the interplay of two factors: first, the scope and scale of national and local homelessness prevention strategies; and second, intra-national variation in public health responses to homelessness.

The paper offers considerable insight from a comparative policy perspective into the nature of healthcare provision for homeless people in the devolved regions.

This article looks at the often complex and enduring relationships between wayfarers (itinerant homeless men) and religious and therapeutic communities, with an eye to examining some of the ways in which such ‘outsider’ organisations embody forms of support and care that in many important respects deviate from traditional night‐shelters and mainstream day‐centres. It aims to achieve this task in four steps. First, the defining characteristics (endurance, mobility, rurality, work) of wayfaring are described. Then I consider how vow‐based communities enable wayfarers, seeking a rest on their journey's way, to experience (albeit temporarily) feelings of acceptance and expressions of hospitality. Next, I illustrate some of these themes with a discussion that draws on ethnographic research undertaken at Pilsdon Manor, a Christian community in rural West Dorset that offers a refuge to people in crisis, and which has been materially and spiritually sustained by 50 years of close engagement with wayfarers. Fourth and last, the article points to topics that might be elaborated upon in future research on the culture of wayfaring and alternative homeless service providers.

As UK substance misuse policy has increasingly focused on the concept of recovery, policymakers, service providers and service users have found “recovery capital” a useful concept to understand the barriers to and facilitators of recovery from substance misuse. There is a rich strand of research that considers the composition of recovery capital in terms of the relevance of resources such as access to mutual aid, familial support and friendship networks, stable housing, structured psychosocial support and education, training and employment. However, such general accounts have tended not to engage with the potential spatial element of recovery capital; that is, how location contributes to the acquisition and management of recovery capital. The purpose of this paper is to add nuance to more generalised accounts through a critical interrogation, exploration and analysis of the role of geography in recovery.

The paper draws on in-depth interviews with service users and service providers in a predominantly rural county in the south-west of England.

The ability to build and sustain recovery capital is shown to be marked by a complex web of social and spatial inclusions/exclusions.

This paper makes three important contributions to prevailing understandings of recovery capital. First, it shows how narratives of recovery are intimately tied to perceptions and experiences of place. Second, it reveals some of the important challenges and complex dilemmas that local drug and alcohol commissioners face in designing and delivering recovery-orientated treatment systems. Third, and finally, it argues that there is a pressing need for a more nuanced appreciation of the social and spatial dynamics of recovery capital.

The critical potential of hospital discharge policies and practices to ameliorate the health and social care needs of homeless people has become the focus of considerable interest in England. Central to this rise in policy formation and practice development is an acute understanding of the multiple exclusions homeless people face in navigating public health and social care systems. In ways small and large this nascent landscape is serving to redefine and reshape hospital arrangements for homeless people, and opening-up new ways to deliver care across clinical, social and therapeutic boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to seek to add empirical vigour and theoretical rigour to this unfolding policy and practice terrain.

This paper draws on findings from a case study concerned with exploring and explaining how statutory and voluntary sector organisations use specialist hospital discharge policies and practices to coordinate pathways of care for homeless people.

This paper illustrates how people affected by homelessness and ill-health are routinely denied access to statutory housing support, social work assessments and district nursing provision through acts of institutional gatekeeping and professional abrogation.

This paper makes an important contribution to understandings of the connections between hospital discharge arrangements for homeless people and statutory housing, social work and district nursing provision.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate a wider debate around the coordination of workforce planning in non-statutory services (in this case, specialist housing for older people or those with long-term health and social care needs, such as learning disabilities). The authors argue that current NHS reforms do not go far enough in that they fail to include specialist housing and its workforce in integration, and by doing so, will be unable to optimise the potential efficiencies and streamlining of service delivery to this group.

The paper used exploratory study using existing research and data, enhanced by documentary analysis from industry bodies, regulators and policy think tanks.

That to achieve the greatest operational and fiscal impact upon the health care services, priority must be given to improving the efficiency and coordination of services to older people and those requiring nursing homes or registered care across the public and third sectors through the integration of service delivery and workforce planning.

Whilst generalisable and achievable, the model proposed within the paper cannot be fully tested theoretically and requires further testing the in real health and social care market to evidence its practicality, improved quality of care and financial benefits.

The paper highlights some potential limitations to the current NHS reforms: by integrating non-statutory services, planned efficiency savings may be optimised and service delivery improved.

Abusive supervision is associated with many detrimental consequences. In this theory-review chapter, we extend the abusive supervision literature in two ways. First, we argue that more attention needs to be given to the emotion contagion processes between the leader and followers. More specifically, leaders’ negative affect can lead to followers’ experiences of negative affect, thereby influencing followers’ perception of abusive supervision. Second, we explore how employees draw upon their cognitive prototypes of an ideal leader or Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) to evaluate leader behaviors. In this regard, we argue that ILTs can influence the (negative) emotional contagion process between the leaders’ negative affect and followers’ perception of abusive supervision. In our proposed model, leaders’ expressions of negative affect, via emotional contagion, influence followers’ negative affect, perception of abusive supervision, and two behavioral responses: affect- and judgment-driven. The negative emotional contagion process between the leader and followers also differs depending on followers’ susceptibility to emotional contagion and their ILTs. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our model.

The purpose of this paper is to extensively report the implications of the global trend of declining fertility rates and an increasingly ageing population. The experiences of childless men are mostly absent from gerontological, psychological, reproduction, and sociological, research. These disciplines have mainly focussed on family formation and practices, whilst the fertility intentions, history, and experience of men have been overlooked. Not fulfilling the dominant social status of parenthood provides a significant challenge to both individual and cultural identity. Distress levels in both infertile men and women have been recorded as high as those with grave medical conditions.

The aim of this paper is to provide some insight into the affect involuntarily childless has on the lives of older men. This auto/biographical qualitative study used a pluralistic framework drawn from the biographical, feminist, gerontological, and life course approaches. Data were gathered from in-depth semi-structured biographical interviews with 14 self-defined involuntary men aged between 49 and 82 years from across the UK. A broad thematic analysis highlighted the complex intersections between involuntary childlessness and agency, biology, relationships, and socio-cultural structures.

Diverse elements affected the men’s involuntary childlessness: upbringing, economics, timing of events, interpersonal skills, sexual orientation, partner selection, relationship formation and dissolution, bereavement, and the assumption of fertility. The importance of relationship quality was highlighted for all the men: with and without partners. Quality of life was affected by health, relationships, and social networks. Awareness of “outsiderness” and a fear of being viewed a paedophile were widely reported.

This is a study based on a small self-selecting “fortuitous” sample. Consequently care should be taken in applying the findings to the wider population.

Health and social care policy, practice and research have tended to focus on family and women. The ageing childless are absent and excluded from policy, practice, and research. Recognition of those ageing without children or family is urgent given that it is predicted that there will be over two million childless people aged 65 and over by 2030 (approximately 25 per cent of the 65 and over population). The consequences for health and social care of individuals and organisations are catastrophic if this does not happen.