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This article reports on the experiences and outcomes of a demonstrator project in Fife aimed at improving intermediate care services. The project focused on three strands: workforce development, extended access and pharmacy. The outcomes provide valuable information to guide future developments in intermediate care services.

After 10 years of visiting her mother in nursing homes, Kate Rees analyses the impact of three safeguarding procedures on her mother's welfare. Her experience underlines the finding of the Report on the Consultation on the Review of the ‘No Secrets’ guidance (Department of Health, 2009) ‐ that too often the vulnerable adult, particularly where that adult lacks capacity, is sidelined, and the process works in the interests of the nursing home.

Geriatric medicine is the branch of general medicine concerned with the clinical, preventive, remedial and social aspects of illness in older people. Rather than being defined by some arbitrary cut‐off in chronological age, it recognises that most older people, especially the ‘young‐old’, are in good health for most of the time. They are likely to benefit from standard medical management by generalists. Geriatricians focus on the more challenging patients ‐ those older people who are physically and cognitively frail, many of whom will be among the growing numbers of the ‘old‐old’. This population is characterised by non‐specific presentation of illness, functional dependency and a need for a multidisciplinary approach to care and judicious use of drug therapy. Drawing on publications from the department of geriatric medicine in Cardiff, this article illustrates important aspects of clinical care of older people and highlight the need for better recognition and prevention, better assessment and diagnosis and better therapeutic tools to manage acute and chronic illness in old age.

This study set out to collect data from assistive technology professionals about their provision of speech‐driven environmental control systems. This study is part of a larger study looking at developing a new speech‐driven environmental control system. A focus group for assistive technology professionals was conducted. This focus group was recorded, transcribed and then analysed using a framework approach. The analysis suggested that professionals have a ‘mental model’ of a successful user of a speech‐driven system and that in general they consider such systems either as a ‘last resort’ or to work in parallel with another system as a back‐up. Perceived poor reliability was highlighted as a major influence in the provision of speech‐driven environmental control systems although there were also positive perceptions about the use of speech under controlled circumstances. Comparison with published data from end‐users showed that professionals highlighted the majority of issues identified by end‐users. Assistive technology professionals think that speech has potential as an access method but are cautious about using speech‐driven environmental control systems predominantly due to concerns about reliability. Professionals seem able to empathise well with the challenges faced by end‐users in use of these systems.

The social care needs of older prisoners is a neglected area. Social care policy and guidance does not exclude them but rarely mentions them explicitly; consequently their needs may be unmet. At the same time, more people are being sentenced and prisoners aged over 60 are the fastest growing group. Equally, older prisoners are rarely subject to the same safeguarding processes that take place in the community. This paper considers both issues and suggests some ways forward.

Dorset County Council and partners commissioned a project in 2008 to develop a plan for ageing well in the county that engaged and involved older people. The completed plan has since been supported by Cabinet and the Local Strategic Partnership. The project was carried out using outcome‐based accountability (Friedman, 2005), a methodology for focusing on outcomes, and this article describes how it worked to support this strategic development in adult services at a time when it had been in much more regular use in children's services.

As one of the most influential theories in strategic management, Hambrick and Mason’s Upper Echelons Theory has yielded significant conceptual and empirical advancements linking executive characteristics and perceptions to decision-making. Specifically, work on this theory consistently shows that CEOs’ decisions are biased by personal characteristics to the benefit and detriment of firms. While this stream of research links executive decision processes to outcomes such as executive dismissals, analyst evaluations, and press coverage, surprisingly little is understood about if and whether the information CEOs convey is subject to the same filtering process by a firm’s key evaluators. Thus, in this chapter, we aim to extend Upper Echelons Theory by positing that a double filtering process occurs whereby the cognitive aids CEOs use can be informed by not only their cognitive base and values but also the characteristics and priorities of those who evaluate the nonverbal and verbal signals they send. To do so, we build on recent conceptual and empirical advancements to make a case for the decision-making biases and tendencies that influence signal interpretation by three key evaluator groups internal and external to the firm: boards of directors, financial analysts, and the media. We conclude by considering the implications of evaluators’ information filtering and how this more holistic view of Upper Echelons decision-making can enable executive teams to be strategic with the cognitive aids they use to influence evaluations.

This paper aims to investigate whether anthropomorphized (i.e. humanized) brands are judged less negatively for competence failures than for moral lapses and how these ethical judgments impact negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) intentions of less-lonely and more-lonely consumers.

Two scenario-based experiments were conducted, involving a total of 1,375 US mechanical turk (Amazon consumer panel) participants.

Findings show that brand humanization has an impact on ethical judgments only for less-lonely consumers. More specifically, for less-lonely consumers, a humanizing strategy backfires when the failure is moral but helps the brand when the failure is competence-related. On the other hand, more-lonely consumers judge the situation less negatively overall, and this effect is not impacted by the anthropomorphization strategy. Process tests indicate that these judgments indirectly affect consumers’ intention to spread NWOM following negative events.

Future research could examine the specific process for lonely consumers (i.e. the role of empathy) and manipulate the size of the negative events (i.e. consumer perceptions of moderate vs extreme failures).

Brand managers need to consider their specific situations, as anthropomorphization can have both positive and negative effects depending on the consumers and the failure type (moral vs competence).

Extant research indicates that a humanizing strategy backfires when the market has negative information about the brand. This research introduces types of negative information, as well as consumers’ loneliness as moderators and contributes to the literature in branding, business ethics and word-of-mouth.