Web of science - exported 12/7/2016

Background: Current end-of-life care policy and guidance recognises the important contribution of family carers, recommending that their needs should be assessed to support them in their caring role. How regular carer assessment is to be achieved is unclear, particularly because there is no evidence-based tool for directly assessing carers’ support needs that is suitable for use in end-of-life home care practice.

The absolute number of dementia cases is likely to increase due to the impending demographic changes. Several cost-of-illness studies of Alzheimer's disease, mainly from a societal perspective in developed countries, have demonstrated a huge economic burden. A substantial component of this huge economic burden is the direct costs of institutionalization and the indirect cost incurred by informal carers. This huge economic burden is of great interest because of the emergence of several cholinesterase inhibitors with proven efficacy in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease.

In this article, five papers that formed the Special Issue for the fourth International Association of Language and Social Psychology Taskforce on health communication are revisited. Our starting point is Gallois's epilogue and the six themes she identified from those papers. These themes are invoked to explore where health communication is moving in the 21st century. Burgeoning work on intergroup communication in this context, patient voice, minority groups, and the role of the carer are highlighted.

Voluntarism has moved to the centre of most western neo-liberal governments' focus in terms of welfare delivery. At the same time, very little of the social policy literature has identified specific historical, cultural and political contexts of place in shaping the particular form of voluntarism and the scale at which it takes place in a country. In order to address policy-related issues of the voluntary sector, a geographical perspective focusing on these local contexts can be very useful in unpacking how the sector can exist across regional and local scales.

Experts in both heart failure and palliative care recommend collaboration between the two disciplines as a mechanism to improve late-stage heart failure care. However, referral rates of heart failure patients to palliative care services remain low. The purpose of this study was to describe the perspectives of heart failure patients and their family members regarding the barriers to palliative care in late-stage heart failure care.

Background: Population ageing has significant effects on societies. The organization of care for dependent old people is one of the key issues for ageing societies. The majority of care for homebound dependent old people in Slovenia is still performed by informal carers, even though the use of formal services has been increasing over the last 20 years. The proportion and characteristics of people with unmet needs are important for the development of long term care social policy.

Studies show that comprehensive and accessible counselling for people with dementia and their informal carers can improve the informal care setting in many ways. For example, a need-oriented and early use of counselling is fundamental for using professional care services. However, many informal carers do not use counselling due to various reasons such as an information deficit and a lack of (regional) accessibility of counselling.

We report findings from a study that set out to explore the experience of older people living with assisted living technologies and care services. We find that successful ‘ageing in place’ is socially and collaboratively accomplished – ‘co-produced’ – day-to-day by the efforts of older people, and their formal and informal networks of carers (e.g. family, friends, neighbours). First, we reveal how ‘bricolage’ allows care recipients and family members to customise assisted living technologies to individual needs.