Web of science - exported 12/7/2016

An issue yet to be examined in the social work research literature concerns an expected death at home and the experiences of informal carers being subjected to a police investigation following a request for help. While research in this area is scant, sufficient mention of unnecessary police involvement is made in the palliative care literature to show that incidents like these have occurred throughout Australia, America, Canada and the UK.

Chronic illnesses impose a great burden on the lives of citizens worldwide. In modern health-care, decentralisa-tion, dehospitalisation and self management of diseases at home are crucial factors for improving the every-day life of the patients and the people close to them. People in general tend to dislike obtrusive monitoring on their daily activities, so the challenge for home care solutions is to implement systems that provide clinicians with adequate and concise information on their patients' health status while at the same time be unobtrusive and easy to use.

Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a chronic medical condition with symptoms that compromise patients’ quality of life (QoL). The identification of the factor predicting QoL in AD is essential to develop more effective interventions. Recent research suggests that these factors could be different for the distinct informants. This study explores the QoL predictors considering three different sources of information: patients, caregivers, and healthcare staff.

Background: Tailor-made care in dementia requires an individual needs assessment. The Camberwell Assessment of Need for the Elderly (CANE) was developed to assess needs of older people with mental disorders. In this study the validity and reliability of the Dutch version of the CANE were studied among community-dwelling persons with dementia and their informal carers.

Aim: To describe the protocol used to examine the processes of communication between health professionals, patients and informal carers during the management of oral chemotherapeutic medicines to identify factors that promote or inhibit medicine concordance.

This paper argues that geography plays a crucial role in the formation of care networks. The role of informal carers will become increasingly important as the population ages and a better understanding of the drivers and outcome of these locational decisions is important. We use data from the British Household Panel Survey to explore the characteristics of common forms of care network; to investigate the factors that may influence the type of care network formed when a need for care is identified and to examine the role of space in the formation of care networks.

The purpose of the study was to analyse the assessments of elderly people aged 65 and more about family caregiving as a factor influencing their quality of life and coping. The study is based on the project SUFACARE—‘Supporting family carers and care receivers in Estonia and in Finland’—in the framework of which the Institute of Social Work of Tallinn University carried out postal surveys in 2010. The Estonian survey was conducted in Tallinn and Lääne-Viru County.

Expected benefits of smart home telecare services do still depend on the capability to develop and validate systems which may foresee or react in an intelligent way to situations demanding specific support to patients, informal carers or authorized staff. Together with wireless sensor networks or broadband communication infrastructures at home, it is needed to create models and methods to solve how a smart home might think and act in identified home care contexts.