Health needs

Aims: The aim of this study was to explore the views of mental health professionals regarding the needs of the informal caregivers of patients with chronic psychotic syndrome. Design: A qualitative research design was used. The sample consisted of 12 mental health professionals selected by a purposive sampling strategy. Data were collected through semistructured, face to face interviews. Framework analysis was used to analyze qualitative data and establish main themes and subthemes.

Background Family caregivers of people with dementia have significant unmet health needs. There is a lack of research that differentiates between the needs that are specifically relevant to partner and offspring caregivers. Objective The aim of this study was to examine the health needs of partner and offspring caregivers of older people with dementia, including the barriers they experience in meeting their needs. Method Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 family caregivers of community-dwelling people with dementia.

Background  This paper describes a novel combination of inclusive methods to evaluate health and health promotion needs of service users (clients) with intellectual disability. Sixty centres provide disability services to over 900 clients with intellectual disability in the East Coast Area Health Board region of Ireland (population approximately 325 000). This is the first known triangulated large-scale approach to inclusive needs assessment of clients using regional disability services in Ireland.

Objective: To compare the scores on the Relative Stress Scale (RSS) with those on the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), and to establish a cut-off score for RSS in order to distinguish carers with symptoms of psychiatric disorders from those without.

The authors review current research on provision of services to older people and their carers in remote and rural areas across the UK, with specific reference to Scotland. They consider the policy implications for dementia services in this context.

The government strategy 'Caring About Carers' acknowledges that state care provision can never replace that of informal carers. Nurses working in primary and community health care potentially have a key role in identifying informal carers, meeting their health needs and ensuring they know of their rights to an assessment under the Carers Act. 

Taking as its starting point the establishment of the Standing Commission on Carers in 2007 and the launch of the National Strategy for Carers in 2008, this article explores who carers are and how demographic changes are likely to impact on carer numbers. It deduces that the need for care is likely to rise significantly in the near future and as such carer numbers will grow. It argues that future policy must take this, and the importance of carers themselves being supported, into account.

Background: Individual assessment of needs has been recognised as the most appropriate way to allocate health and social care resources. These assessments, however, are often made by the staff or by a carer who acts as an advocate for the user themselves. Little is known about how these proxy measures compare to how individual patients perceive their own needs.

Aim: The aim of this study was to measure and compare ratings of need for older people with mental health problems by the older person themselves, their carer, and an appropriate staff member.

This study assesses the effect of having informal support available at home on inpatient care use in Switzerland. The main contributions are to consider the availability of care regardless of its source, measured by multiple-adult living arrangements, and to examine this effect by type of inpatient care and source of potential support. A two-part model with region and time fixed effects is estimated to determine the impact of informal care availability on the likelihood of hospitalisation and length of stay, conditional on hospitalisation.