English

Objective: To develop an intervention, using the first three phases of the Medical Research Council (MRC) framework for complex interventions, to facilitate coping skills in new carers of stroke patients.

Background: This study is the first to explore how rumination or recurrent dwelling may contribute to psychological distress in palliative care.

Continuity of care is considered by patients and clinicians as an essential feature of good quality care in long-term disorders, yet there is general agreement that it is a complex concept and the lack of clarity in its conceptualisation and operationalisation has been linked to a deficit of user involvement. In this paper we utilise the concept of the ‘patient career’ to frame patient accounts of their experiences of the mental health care system.

Aim.  This paper reports a study to assess the palliative care needs of the adult population served by a healthcare provider organization in Northern Ireland from the perspectives of patients, informal carers and healthcare providers.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of an empirically based theoretical model of abuse of women with physical disabilities. The Abuse Pathways model was developed from a critical disability life history research study conducted with 37 women who had simultaneously experienced abuse and physical disability. The model begins to address the complexity of abuse of women with physical disabilities by identifying the interactive components of the phenomenon.

Background: The aim of this study was to develop a tool to measure the family's difficulties in caring for cancer patients at the end of life at home: Family's Difficulty Scale in end-of-life home care (FDS).

Methods: The draft of the FDS was derived from a pilot interview survey and literature reviews. The questionnaires were sent to 395 bereaved family caregivers whose family members were patients with terminal cancer receiving home service.

For a long time, the international literature has described the Italian public system of home care for frail elderly people as underfunded and mostly cash-oriented; a system, thus, relying almost entirely on informal care provided by the family and, more recently, by migrant workers. Abroad and in Italy, most experts have long shared the expectation that, if and when, public expenditure devoted to home care was to increase, the outcome would be an expansion in the provision of services in kind. This study analyses how the provision of home care actually has changed in the last decade.

This study evaluated the association between presence and types of informal caregivers and the presence of depressive symptoms among older adults receiving formal home health care (HHC). A secondary analysis of data was conducted using a computerized patient care database, the Outcome and Assessment Information Set. Logistic regression analyses were used to examine the data of 8448 patients aged 65 years or older who had been admitted to an HHC agency from acute care hospitals between January 1, 2002 and June 30, 2002. The outcome variable was the presence of depressive symptoms.

As the population continues to age, more of us are becoming carers, and many just juggle responsibilities between working and caring. Innovative policy reform is fundamental if we are to meet future demand for care, explains Dalia Ben-Galim.