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This article aims to understand the housing needs of older people and to ascertain the level of demand and supply of age-related housing in Scotland. It also explores interest in different types of retirement accommodation and tenure options.

A review of existing literature is undertaken on senior housing preferences and residential satisfaction. Primary data is collected from an online survey of people over 55 in Scotland to ascertain demand side requirements with secondary data on current supply obtained from the Elderly Accommodation Counsel and data on future pipeline collated from market reports.

The results from the survey confirm earlier research that seniors when looking for accommodation in their retirement years particularly focus on the local area, access to shops, social relations with neighbours and the design of the home interior. Current analysis of the level of supply at a county level reveals that there is significant undersupply with some particularly striking regional differences. Along with a desire for owner occupation there is interest, particularly among the 75 plus age group, to lease their accommodation, perhaps a consequence of volatile property markets, insufficient pension provision or a desire to pass wealth to their family prior to death. This shortfall in supply highlights development opportunities and raises the possibility of introducing a build-to-rent senior housing offering, which may be of interest to institutional investors.

The Scottish Government is currently reviewing its strategy for Scotland's older people. The results are of practical benefit as they expose the gaps in supply of age-related stock at county level. This may require the government to introduce policy measures to encourage a mix of housing types suited for the ageing demographics of the population. This research highlights opportunities for developers and investors to fill that gap and explains why advancements in technology should be incorporated in the design process.

This paper brings together supply side data of senior housing in Scotland and provides insights into the housing preferences of seniors. It will be of direct value and interest to developers and institutional investors.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how access to vaccination for older people in the UK can be both improved and used as a tool for healthy ageing.

ILC-UK released a report “Adult Immunisation in the UK”, which applied a UK perspective to a 2013 Supporting Active Ageing Through Immunisation (SAATI) report on immunisation. The ILC report combined the SAATI findings with a traditional literature review, a policy review incorporating grey literature and the outcomes of a focus group discussion. This paper highlights the key findings of the ILC-UK report.

Vaccination needs to be included as part of proactive strategies to promote healthy and active ageing. Initiatives need to be explored that increase the rate of delivery of vaccinations. Barriers to the vaccination of health and social care professionals working with older people need to be removed. The government should explore using psychological insights into human behaviour to improve the take-up of vaccinations amongst adults. The range of settings where older people can receive vaccination needs to be expanded. Information on the potential benefits of immunisation should be made readily available and easily accessible to older people.

The paper calls for a structural shift in how vaccination services in the UK are organised.

The paper calls for a cultural shift in how society views immunisation and the role it has to play in the healthy ageing process.

The paper uses new European research on immunisation and applies it to the UK's situation.

Decentralisation of many food retailers to edge‐of‐town and out‐of‐town locations has resulted in some older people experiencing difficulty in accessing food shops and those experiencing the greatest difficulties in food shopping are considered to be at the greatest nutritional risk. The present study examines how and to what extent usage of, and physical access to food shops might influence dietary variety. Shopping behaviour and dietary variety are investigated using focus groups, a consumer questionnaire and a food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). A dietary variety score system, developed from the FFQ, is employed in this study. Neither usage of (particular) food shops nor basic accessibility variables are found to have a direct effect on dietary variety. Yet, coping strategies employed by older consumers to obtain food are revealed to be important. This suggests that more complex access factors remain an important issue for study in relation to the shopping experience of a proportion of the older population.

This paper seeks to provide an overview of key issues involved in older men's mental health and well being and describes a service improvement project called Grouchy Old Men? that focused on older men who were isolated and at risk of depression and suicide.

Grouchy Old Men? was a two‐year project that used a “change agent” model of organisational development, which aimed to improve the mental health and well being of older men through gathering and disseminating examples of good practice and piloting a training module to raise awareness about the mental health of older men.

The project was successful in supporting and promoting a number of local initiatives and organisations, as well as a national network, seeking to develop services to better meet the needs of this group, as well as raising awareness more generally about older men's mental health.

The paper suggests ways that services for older people can develop in order to make themselves more accessible to older men with mental health needs.

The paper brings together policy, research, and practical service improvement initiatives that will be of interest and relevance to policy makers, practitioners, and anyone with an interest in the mental health of older men.

Peter Townsend is one of the greatest social scientists of the twentieth century and best known for his pioneering research into poverty. This paper aims to revisit Townsend's early work discussing the measurement of poverty and attempts to operationalise his ideas for determining minimum income standards for healthy living.

The article is based upon a secondary analysis of data taken from the UK Expenditure and Food Survey, a continuous cross‐sectional survey of household income, expenditure, and food consumption. Here, the sample has been restricted to an older population and the authors observe the relationship between household income and a healthy standard of living (indicated by diet) for people aged 60 years and over.

Minimum income requirements for healthy living, for this population in the UK, are 37 per cent greater than the British state pension for single pensioners and 37 per cent for pensioner couples. It is also appreciably greater than the official minimum income safety net (after means testing), the pension credit guarantee.

Objective evidence‐based assessment of living standards are practicable but do not presently provide a basis for social policy in the UK or elsewhere apparently. Such assessment could provide a credible basis for helping to establish minimum income standards in official policy.

Recent developments in the design of a British social survey have made it possible to operationalise Townsend's ideas for establishing minimum income standards over half a century after he proposed them.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on long-standing, structural race inequality in Britain. This paper aims to review historic patterns of ethnic diversity among the workforce employed in services for older people to present some of the lessons that can be learned from the pandemic.

A historical overview was undertaken of research about ethnic diversity in the social care workforce.

Too often, the ethnic diversity of the social care workforce has been taken as evidence that structural racial inequalities do not exist. Early evidence about the impact of coronavirus on workers from black and minority ethnic groups has led to initiatives aimed at reducing risk among social care employers in the independent sector and in local government. This offers a blueprint for further initiatives aimed at reducing ethnic inequalities and promoting ethnic diversity among the workforce supporting older people.

The increasing ethnic diversity of the older population and the UK labour force highlights the importance of efforts to address what is effective in reducing ethnic inequalities and what works in improving ethnic diversity within the social care workforce and among those using social care services for older people.

The ethnic makeup of the workforce reflects a complex reality based on multiple factors, including historical patterns of migration and gender and ethnic inequalities in the UK labour market.

The issues of concern to older people and likely to shape their voting behaviour need to be understood and appreciated. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This policy-oriented review draws on recent research, including surveys, focus groups and ethnographic interviews to identify such issues in the UK older population.

Older people are more likely to vote and to prioritise policy issues relating to immigration, the NHS and the economy–but the outcome of their vote is more likely to be determined by affinity with a party’s broader ideological position than with the specific policies contained in their manifesto?.

Older people appear more likely to support Conservative party values and priorities, but their potential growing support for UKIP may be underestimated as several major surveys do not prompt for this party. The less certain standing of both Conservative and Labour may therefore be further undermined by unappreciated shifts in the “grey vote”.

This commentary highlights the increasing importance of the “grey vote” at a time of increasing unpredictability in support for mainstream parties.

This paper aims to whether current public expenditure on adult social care services might be associated with the number of delayed days of care attributable to the social care system in England.

Panel econometric models on data from local authorities with adult social care responsibilities in England between 2013–2014 and 2018–2019.

After controlling for other organisational sources of inefficiency, the level of demand in the area and the income poverty amongst the resident older population, this paper finds that a 4.5% reduction in current spending per head on adult social care per older person in one year is associated with an increase by 0.01 delayed days per head the following year.

Given the costs of adverse outcomes of delayed transfers of care reported in the literature, this paper suggests that budgetary constraints to adult social care services would represent a false economy of public funds.

This is the first paper that models the association between public spending on adult social care and delayed transfers of care due to issues originating in the social care system in England.

This paper aims to understand the lived experience of a person living with dementia in a care home during the COVID-19 pandemic. It responds to the absence in research of the voices of people with dementia living in care homes during the pandemic.

The paper adopts a single case study design applied thematic analysis to semi-structured interview data to discover the experiences of one person living with dementia in a care home during a period of lockdown.

Five themes reveal how the participant responded to the practical and emotional challenges of the pandemic: autonomy; fears; keeping connected; keeping safe and other people living with dementia. These themes highlight the participant’s ability to adapt, accept and dispute lockdown restrictions, revealing considerable insight into their situation.

The pandemic has restricted access to care homes, which informed the single case study design. This approach to the research may restrict the generalisability of the findings. Other researchers are encouraged to include the voices of people with dementia living in care homes in further studies.

Implications for practice, presented in this paper, promote quality psychosocial approaches when health-care workers engage with people living with dementia during periods of restricted activity.

Unlike other studies about the impact of the pandemic on care homes, this paper explores the experience of the pandemic in care homes from the perspective of a person living with dementia.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyse the readmission risk prediction tools reported in the literature and their benefits when it comes to healthcare organisations and management.

Readmission risk prediction is a growing topic of interest with the aim of identifying patients in particular those suffering from chronic diseases such as congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes, who are at risk of readmission. Several models have been developed with different levels of predictive ability. A structured and extensive literature search of several databases was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis strategy, and this yielded a total of 48,984 records.

Forty-three articles were selected for full-text and extensive review after following the screening process and according to the eligibility criteria. About 34 unique readmission risk prediction models were identified, in which their predictive ability ranged from poor to good (c statistic 0.5–0.86). Readmission rates ranged between 3.1 and 74.1% depending on the risk category. This review shows that readmission risk prediction is a complex process and is still relatively new as a concept and poorly understood. It confirms that readmission prediction models hold significant accuracy at identifying patients at higher risk for such an event within specific context.

Since most prediction models were developed for specific populations, conditions or hospital settings, the generalisability and transferability of the predictions across wider or other contexts may be difficult to achieve. Therefore, the value of prediction models remains limited to hospital management. Future research is indicated in this regard.

This review is the first to cover readmission risk prediction tools that have been published in the literature since 2011, thereby providing an assessment of the relevance of this crucial KPI to health organisations and managers.