Decision making

INTRODUCTION: In 2009, the United Kingdom Department of Health identified the need to assist families so that people with dementia can remain living at home. Occupational therapists could support families and their loved ones at home by understanding the human occupational impact of caregiving. This impact includes how one is influenced by values and motivated to perform activities shaped by experiences and life roles.

The aim of this study was to help develop support services for carers of people with dementia on admission to a district general hospital. Qualitative methodology was used in the form of individual semi-structured interviews. These interviews suggest that service developments need to take into account the individual need of each carer. Identified themes included communication, vulnerability of the carers and the need to develop a therapeutic relationship with the carer as well as the person with dementia.

This paper reports findings from a qualitative study concerning the influence of implicit models of mental disorder on shared decision making within community-based mental health teams. One-hundred participants representing five distinct multi-agency groups: psychiatrists, community psychiatric nurses, approved social workers, patients and informal carers operating within Leicestershire, England were interviewed using a standard case vignette describing a person whose behaviour suggests he may have schizophrenia.

Objectives: In recent years advanced technologies, such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS), allow for tracking of human spatial activity and provide the ability to intervene to manage that activity. The purpose of this study is to examine the issue of who should decide about the use of electronic tracking using GPS for people with dementia.

This article explores the potential impact of the mental health and mental incapacity law reforms on carers. The reform proposals anticipate a number of overlapping and at times conflicting roles for carers (including those of gatekeeper, decision-making proxy and advocate), which is suggestive of an ongoing ambivalence toward the caring role at the level of ethics, policy and strategic planning.

The increase of chronic illness as a leading cause of death has given rise to self-care and expert patient initiatives. Caring for chronically ill people places a tremendous economic burden on the health care system, informal carers, the labour market and benefit system (Department of Health 2001, 2004, 2005). Thus, in many countries health policy encourages patients to become ‘experts’ in the self-management of their conditions in the belief that it will help save money and improve health and well-being (Wanless 2002).

This e-learning training module aims to support re-orientation and re-skilling of staff directly involved in decision-making using Fair access to care services (FACS) and eligibility criteria, their supervisors and line managers, and those monitoring and reporting on the operations of the system.

The Mental Capacity Act comes into full effect on 1 October 2007. This article aims to provide answers to some of the most frequent voiced questions and misapprehensions from mental health service users, carers, and practitioners about what the Act will mean to them.

We conducted a mixed-methods knowledge synthesis to assess the effectiveness of interventions to improve caregivers' involvement in decision making with seniors, and to describe caregivers' experiences of decision making in the absence of interventions. We analyzed forty-nine qualitative, fourteen quantitative, and three mixed-methods studies. The qualitative studies indicated that caregivers had unmet needs for information, discussions of values and needs, and decision support, which led to negative sentiments after decision making.