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Integrated care is the leading approach to developing health and social care services in Finland. After the national health and social care reform, the importance of assessing integration has been emphasized. The aim of this study was to pilot the SCIROCCO tool, which assesses integration maturity, in Finland. The SCIROCCO tool was translated and adapted to the Finnish health and social care context. The feasibility and utility of this tool for assessing the maturity for integration across health and social care in Finland were evaluated using empirical pilot data collected among employees of selected well-being service counties. The study also provided baseline information on the maturity of integration after the national health and social care reform.

Employees (n = 111) of different personnel groups in health and social care services in four well-being service counties assessed the maturity of integration using a web-based survey. A pilot study design was used.

The SCIROCCO tool was found to be useful for assessing the maturity of integration in health and social care within the well-being service counties. However, the tool requires further development to be fully adapted to the Finnish health and social care system and to assess integration across sectors. The results emphasize the need to understand the perspectives of different personnel groups on integration and to consider them in the development work.

This was the first study conducted in Finland that provided valuable insights into the assessment of integration across the health and social care sectors. This study establishes the foundation for future research and development in the field of integration assessment.

Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers – wound clinicians and care workers – the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors’ assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in ‘doing’ dirty work and in the ‘purpose’ of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.

As social infrastructures, public libraries are increasingly recognised as providing more than access to books and information; librarians’ work is importantly centred around practices of care. However, the ways in which they provide care is poorly researched, let alone conceptualised. This paper explores how this important part of librarians’ daily work is practiced through the lens of infrastructuring.

The paper first theoretically discusses the concepts of social infrastructuring, care and tinkering. Then, it turns to ethnographic research conducted in the public library networks of three European cities: Vienna (Austria), Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and Malmö (Sweden). The paper comprises empirical materials from all three countries and unpacks 16 librarians’ daily working routines of care through participant observations.

The empirical analysis resulted in three modes of social infrastructuring in public libraries: (1) maintaining, (2) building connections and (3) drawing boundaries. Practices of care are prominent in each of these infrastructuring modes: librarians infrastructure the library with and via their care practices. Whilst care practices are difficult to quantify and verbalise, they are valuable for library patrons. By using the concept of tinkering, the article conceptualises librarians’ infrastructuring enactments as crucial community-building aspects of libraries.

By focusing on the enactment of social infrastructuring, the paper goes beyond a descriptive approach to understanding public libraries as important social infrastructures. Rather, the paper unpacks how libraries come into being as infrastructuring agencies by highlighting what librarians do and say. Our international study articulates the importance of care practices in public libraries across different national contexts.

This study aims to explore how social support has reshaped the care of older adults living alone in northeast Thailand during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study used a qualitative method using a narrative gerontological perspective with a descriptive design. Purposive sampling was conducted from 20 in-depth narrative interviews between November 2021 and February 2022 in Maha Sarakham province, northeast Thailand. Data transcriptions were performed using a narrative analytical process.

The in-depth narrative interviews indicated that older adults living alone during the coronavirus pandemic valued a comfortable life, a sense of place, favourable living arrangements, self-reliance, life goals and meaningful life. The gerontological analysis showed that social support for older adults living alone included a social safety net, networking, supporting needs, physical care and mental health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first qualitative narrative gerontological study to explore how social support reshaped the care of older adults living alone during the COVID-19 pandemic in northeast Thailand.

This chapter focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the recognition through discourses of essentiality, of low-status workers and more specifically of care aides as an occupational group that performs society’s ‘dirty work’. The pandemic appears as a privileged moment to challenge the normative hegemony of how work is valued within society. However, public recognition through political discourse is a necessary but insufficient element in producing social change. Based on the theory of performativity, this chapter empirically probes conditions and mechanisms that enable a transition from discourse of essentiality to substantive recognition of the work performed by care aides in healthcare organizations. The authors rely on three main sources of data: scientific-scholarly works, documents from government, various associations and unions, and popular media reports published between February 2020 and 1 July 2022. While discourse of essentiality at the highest level of politics is associated with rapid policy response to value the work of care aides, it is embedded in a system structure and culture that restrains the establishment of substantive policy that recognizes the nature, complexity, and societal importance of care aide work. The chapter contributes to the literature on performativity by demonstrating the importance of the institutionalization of competing logics in contemporary health and social care systems and how it limits the effectiveness of discourse in promulgating new values and norms and engineering social change.

We identify lessons from a project sponsored by a large charitable trust, which sought to build capability for end-of-life (EOL) care in Hong Kong through interdisciplinary and multi-agency collaboration.

An in-depth case study drawing on 21 in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders was conducted. Lyman et al.’s (2018) model of organisational learning (OL) in healthcare settings was applied to analyse the relative emphasis on particular contextual factors and mechanisms, and to identify outcomes perceived to have been achieved.

Infrastructure such as materials for assessment and education received the most emphasis among the contextual factors and deliberate learning such as training sessions received the greatest attention among the mechanisms. While perceptions indicated that desired outcomes were being achieved in terms of social impact, there were relatively few mentions of “soft” factors such as enhanced motivation, leadership or OL skills among staff.

This study extends the literature on how to create valuable social impact through OL. While prior studies have examined social impact in terms of solutions for social and environmental problems, ours is one of the few that examines how improvements are made to organisations’ capability to deliver such impacts in the context of healthcare.

In the UK signposting services can be developed as enhanced support for people with health and social care needs or service diversion to help primary and urgent care services manage their workload. This review considers these two conflicting purposes.

The review used a realist approach, initial searches to identify theory; we then selected 22 publications and extracted programme theories, from which we developed questions from three viewpoints: the service user, the front-line service provider and the commissioner. A rich sample of studies were found from purposive searching. To optimise the applicability of synthesis findings predominantly UK studies were included.

Users value signposting service that understand their needs, suggest a range of options and summarise potential actions. People with complex health and social care needs generally require extended time/input from signposting services. Front-line providers require initial and ongoing training, support/supervision, good knowledge of available services/resources and the ability to match users to them and a flexible response. Commissioned signposting services in England are diverse making evaluation difficult.

Meaningful evaluation of signposting services requires greater clarity around roles and service expectations. Signposting services alone fulfil the needs of a small number of users due to the unreconciled tension between efficient (transactional) service provision and effective (relational) service provision. This is underpinned by competing narratives of whether signposting represents diversion of inappropriate demand from primary care and other urgent care services or improved quality of care through a joined-up response encompassing health, social care and community/voluntary services.

This research paper aims to study the achievement of the objectives set by the Government of Kerala through the Arogyakeralam Pain and Palliative Care project.

The research paper delves into diverse facets of an individual’s well-being including medical, emotional, spiritual and social aspects, when confronted with an incurable and incapacitating disease through the intervention of the PPC project. This insightful study was conducted in the state of Kerala, India.

The analysis reveals that quality of life (QoL) is most influenced by spiritual, social and psychological factors. This paper raises pertinent questions about the effectiveness of PPC initiatives within the realm of medical care.

The thought, conception and preparation of the subject is on improving social health care by assessing the existing practices followed by the local governance. This, by far, would benefit millions by formulating appropriate policies for improving the QoL.

The Kerala model of health care has garnered global acclaim, standing shoulder to shoulder with the health systems of developed nations. Adopting “active total care” to address pain and allied indications, the Arogyakeralam palliative care program significantly enhances patients' QoL. The focus was to uplift the QoL of patients suffering from terminal illnesses post-pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the profile of the Andalusian population in relation to the motivations that support family care for older people, considering multiple sociodemographic and classificatory variables, such as sex, age groups (18–29; 30–44; 45–59; 60 or older), caregiving experience, as well as their general opinions regarding care and decision-making related to it.

A quantitative study is presented to know the opinion of the Andalusian population regarding the motivations that support the family care of older people. The sample comprised 774 participants (18 years or older).

The results show that the majority of the Andalusian population believes that the reason why families care for older people is that it is considered a moral obligation, regardless of the resources available to them. Thus, two population profiles have been found to explain these beliefs. The first profile is made up of current or former caregivers who are 60 years of age or older; and the second profile is made up of people who believe that the family should be primarily responsible for caregiving, who are or have been caregivers and who believe that in the future, the family trend in caregiving will not be modified.

The value of this research lies in the implications of “family care” and “resources and motivations to care” studies today.

This study applies Garfinkel’s (1967) concept of ‘breaching experiment’ to explore the impact of COVID-19-induced disruptions on the ‘emotion management’ practices of residential care workers in the United Kingdom and Germany. It examines the influence of professional feeling rules on workers, emphasizing the prescribed importance of displaying affective, empathetic concern for residents’ health and well-being. Findings demonstrate that authenticity and adherence to professional feeling rules in relation to emotional management are not mutually exclusive. The authors underscore how adherence to professional feeling rules upholds authentic care by reinforcing a professional ethos, which acts as a cornerstone motivating residential care workers. Ultimately, the study showcases how a professional ethos substantiates altruistic motivations, guiding proficient emotion management practices among care workers. It highlights how these workers drew upon their personal understanding and experiences to determine the appropriate emotions to express while providing care for residents amid the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic.