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Figures from the USA and the UK suggest that a high proportion of elderly people in residential care would benefit from dietary therapy for common degenerative disorders. A postal survey examined the extent to which dietary advice was made available to homes and social service departments. The results showed that minimal contact between homes, social services and dietitians was the norm – 14 per cent of social service departments employed a dietitian; only 3 and 5 per cent respectively involved them on advisory committees. Concludes that the potential of dietitians to improve residents′ quality of life has not been fully exploited and thus nutritional care is based on a reactive system.

Reports surveys of managers and environmental health officers (EHOs) carried out at the Food Policy Research Unit between December 1990 and April 1993 to evaluate current food safety monitoring system and relations between the various parties involved in residential care homes. A high degree of consensus existed among EHOs on the potential hygiene risks in homes and their consequences for residents. In up to 60 per cent of homes these risks were more probable than possible, with fundamental defects such as inadequate cleanliness and poor kitchen design being found. Blame did not lie entirely with the management of these homes – when they turned to the local EHOs for help 80 per cent were dismayed to find a high degree of disparity in the advice offered by individual officers and a lack of accord even on basic issues. Greater collaboration with the other agencies responsible for monitoring standards in care homes and nationally agreed standards are essential to improve levels of food safety, protect vulnerable elderly people and maintain the credibility of the environmental health profession.

Early health education messages made the assumption that most recommendations made on healthy eating were irrelevant to the majority of elderly people. Discusses a new report by the UK Government which has challenged this idea and now suggests that the older generation should also reduce fat, sugar and alcohol intake and increase exercise to fall in line with the population in general. This approach creates difficulties because: the elderly are so diverse as a group; those in care have a range of very practical barriers to healthy eating; and staff of care homes have to balance nutritional requirements with the resident′s need for enjoyment. Despite the apparent problems healthy eating does have a role to play. Elderly people suffer from many degenerative disorders which respond to healthy eating in the form of nutritional therapy. This approach has numerous health benefits, not least because it may reduce the number of drugs a resident requires.

Discusses the current situation whereby the majority of elderly people in the UK regularly take at least one prescribed drug and a significant proportion are given long‐term multiple drug therapy. Those in institutions are particularly prone to over‐prescribing. Shows that the rate of prescription is highly significant because large numbers of elderly people have adverse reactions to their medication. In the case of nutritional reactions, the side‐effects of drugs can cause loss of interest in food or precipitate micronutrient deficiencies. Notes that in an elderly person these drug‐diet reactions have considerable knock‐on effects on nutritional status, physical and mental health and immunity to infection. Stresses, therefore, that programmes of drug review and reductions are vital among all elderly people but should be integrated especially into the routines of homes and hospitals

The most significant demographic change in the UK this century has been the relatively rapid ageing of the population. More specifically, the growth of the very old (those over 80) has widespread implications for health and community care in the UK. Despite the Government′s recently revised community care policy, the changes in family structure brought about through divorce, geographical mobility and lower birth rate, as well as the degenerative nature of many mental and physical diseases, has meant that there are more elderly people being cared for in institutions, particularly private care homes. Consequently, private homes are responsible for the nutritional wellbeing of thousands of elderly people. Reviews the findings of a study of private homes in West Yorkshire in 1992‐3 on the problems of catering for elderly people in care and points to some areas where successes in the field of healthy eating and improving health and independence have occurred.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, nutrition education and health promotion have increasingly focused on the influence of diet on the quality of life in old age. The Government′s Health of the Nation policy in 1991 and the COMA report on The Nutrition of Elderly People in 1992 both emphasized the need for older age groups to adopt the dietary changes recommended for the population as a whole. In order to promote healthier eating habits and consequently improve health status, it is first vital to understand what makes elderly people follow particular dietary patterns and, equally, which factors constrain their choice. Reviews the current state of research on the social, economic, psychological, physiological, educational and personal factors which mediate food choice in later life. Indications are that it is the structural influences on choice which have the greatest impact – education, income, class and access to good health care. As a result, action at national level in the form of health and social policy designed to take into account the needs of older generations is highlighted.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.