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This article analyses community care services (CCS) in terms of availability, awareness, accessibility, and acceptance (the Four A’s approach), untangles the deep-seated factors underlying the CCS and provides some short-term, medium-term, and long-term recommendations.

A literature review was conducted, including relevant government reports, consultation papers, Legislative Council papers and articles from academic journals from 1980 to the present.

The Four A’s approach shows that applicants to both centre-based services and home-based services endure lengthy waiting times because of the limited number of CCS. Furthermore, the awareness of day respite services is approximately 50 percent, which lags behind other CCS. Accessibility is contingent on a cross-district day respite service system and a lack of consistency between the quota and the proportion of older adults in the districts. Finally, the level of service provided by CCS is unsatisfactory due to inflexible service provision. Reviewing the brief history of long-term care services (LTC) reveals the deep-seated factors at the core of their heavy reliance on the subvention model, in contrast to the adoption of the ‘mixed economy of care’ by residential care services (RCS). An imbalance in budget allocation to RCS and CCS is also revealed.

Although the principle of ‘ageing in place’ was introduced in 1977, the institutionalisation rate (6.8 percent) of older adults remains unexpectedly high in Hong Kong, even surpassing its Asian counterparts, whereas the usage rate of CCS hovers around 0.8 percent. Thus, how to implement policy concerning LTC services for older adults must be re-evaluated.

The purpose of this paper is to present findings from face-to-face interviews undertaken with 16 care and nursing home managers employed in homes situated in two English local authorities. The research sought to explore managers’ perceptions of the role of contract monitoring in the prevention of abuse.

Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 16 care and nursing home managers.

Though personnel employed by the local authority who conducted contract monitoring were generally thought of positively by care home managers on a personal level, their effectiveness was perceived to be limited as a result of their lack of experience and knowledge of providing care, and the methods that they were required to use.

Though the research draws upon the experiences of only 16 care and nursing home managers in two local authorities, data suggest that current contract monitoring activity is of limited utility in determining the true nature of care and the presence of abuse.

Unusually, the paper explores care and nursing home managers’ perceptions of contract monitoring processes in terms of how they perceive their effectiveness in preventing abuse.

We conducted consumer research with more than 2,000 adults and more than 100 representatives from retirement housing providers from across the UK to identify the “perception gap” and gathered high-profile representatives from across the retirement housing sector to discuss the data.

Our research shows that the public are unsure about the benefits and services provided by retirement housing schemes – often confusing them with care homes and nursing homes to the detriment of the sector.

We identify an untapped referrer market for retirement living, that men should be targeted with entry-level information and people should be targeted before retirement age when perceptions are less “fixed”.

We show the services that matter most to ABC1 demographic and the sources they use to find information.

We outline how the sector can make retirement housing a model of “want” instead of a model of “need”.

The study refers to a health-care organization engaged in adopting “home health care” as a new object of activity. This study aims to explore how the reconfiguration of the object influences the transformative perspective, affecting not just a service but a broader approach and meaning behind patient care. It also investigates the main contradictions at play and the levers to support inter-organizational learning while facing the new challenges and change processes.

The work is based on a qualitative and ethnographic methodology directed to examine cultural, practical and socio-material aspects. The activity theory is assumed as a powerful approach to understand collective learning and distributed agency processes.

The renewal of the new object of work is analyzed as a trigger for shifts in representations, cultural processes and collective support implemented by the organization. Three agentic trajectories – technical, dialogical and collaborative agency – were cultivated by the management to deliver home health care through joint exercises of coordination and control, dialogical spaces and collaborative process.

The data collection was disrupted by the pandemic. A follow-up study would be beneficial to inquire how the learning processes shifted or were influenced by the contextual changes.

This contribution provides a practical framework for health-care organizations aiming to navigate and explore the physiological tensions and contradictions emerging when the object of work is changed.

The paper develops the field of intra- and inter-organizational learning by presenting an intertwined and structural connection between these processes and the renewing of the object of work. It advises that processes of transformation must be handled with attention to the critical and collective dynamics that accompany sustainable and situated changes.

The purpose of this paper is to compare home care workers' views of their employment conditions by provider type – private for-profit vs public and non-profit – using the case study of Ireland.

An online survey was distributed to care workers (n = 350) employed by private for-profit, public and non-profit home care providers in Ireland. Returned questionnaires were analysed statistically in R using chi-squared tests to systematically compare key aspects of employment conditions.

Analysis shows that conditions are perceived to be significantly worse for those employed by private for-profit providers (and to a lesser extent non-profit organisations) compared to the public provider. There are wide disparities between public and private sector conditions in terms of contracts, pensions, unsocial hours pay and travel time allowances. The main area of convergence is in relation to employer support, where although the public sector performed better, the difference between the three provider types is smaller.

Relatively little research compares working conditions in private for-profit providers vs public and non-profit providers in Ireland and other countries. The findings can be understood in the context of marketisation reforms and may partly be explained by a lack of regulation in Ireland's home care sector and low unionisation rates amongst care workers employed by private for-profit providers.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether incorporating a 20-week Kundalini yoga programme into a residential home for children improves well-being outcomes.

This is a mixed methods feasibility study. Feasibility was assessed through recruitment and retention rates as well as participants’ self-report perceptions on social inclusion, mental health and well-being and through semi-structured interviews on the benefits of the study. Mutual recovery entailed that children in care (CIC), youth practitioners and management participated together in the Kundalini yoga sessions.

The study initially enrolled 100 per cent of CIC and 97 per cent (29/30) of eligible staff. Attendance was low with an average rate of four sessions per participant (SD=3.7, range 0-13). All the participants reported that the study was personally meaningful and experienced both individual (e.g. feeling more relaxed) and social benefits (e.g. feeling more open and positive). Pre- and post-yoga questionnaires did not show any significant effects. Low attendance was associated with the challenges faced by the children’s workforce (e.g. high levels of stress, low status, profile and pay) and insufficient consultation and early involvement of stakeholders on the study implementation process.

Because of the chosen research approach (i.e. feasibility study) and low attendance rate, the research results may lack generalisability. Therefore, further research with larger samples including a control or comparison group to pilot similar research questions is mandatory.

This study has generated a number of valuable guiding principles and recommendations that might underpin the development of any future intervention for CIC and staff working in children’s homes.

The concept of togetherness and mutuality within residential spaces is discussed in the paper.

The effects of Kundalini yoga have not been reported before in any peer-review publications. This paper fulfils an identified need (i.e. poor outcomes among CIC and residential staff) and shows how movement and creative practices can support the concept of mutual recovery.