older people

It is bad enough that carers witness the decline of the person closest to them, but to have to attend to their every need and be on the receiving end of their anger and frustration is worse. The author explains how one care home has helped her mother cope with her living loss.

Age‐related disability in bathroom use is already a significant problem, and is destined to become even greater. Previous research has focused on how the person can be enabled to cope with the bathroom environment by functional training or introduction of assistive technologies. More recently attention has been drawn to the design of bathroom furniture.

This article explores developments in the support available to older people and carers (i.e., caregivers) in the city of Leeds, United Kingdom, and examines provision changes during a period characterized by unprecedented resource constraint and new developments in national-local governance. Using documentary evidence, official statistics, and findings from recent studies led by the author, the effects of these changes on service planning and delivery and the approach taken by local actors to mitigate their impact are highlighted.

This study describes what types of service use barriers older adults' informal care-givers perceive and examines how these barriers differentiate care-giver service use patterns. Analysing the 2004 National Long-Term Care Survey and Informal Care-giver Data Set (N=1908) in the United States of America, this study reports the prevalence of service barriers for each type of service as well as for overall service use.

Since the community care reforms of the early 1990s, practical support for informal carers has become one of the key building blocks of community care policy in England and Wales. In 2004, Linda Pickard wrote a report for the Audit Commission called The Effectiveness and Cost-effectiveness of Support and Services for Informal Carers of Older People. This summary highlights the key points.

The general knowledge of family caregivers’ experience of burden during the continuing care of a close relative with dementia is incomplete. Several types of care settings are available today, and, for carers, modalities of burden probably differ between these settings. The aim of this study was to explore whether burden differed significantly between former family caregivers (FFCs) to people with dementia who were in group living care (GLC), a small home-like unit for six to eight people, compared with people with dementia in nursing homes (NH).

Reports on the development of a joint mental health strategy for older people in a central London Borough. The project brought together clinicians and practitioners from a variety of settings, the voluntary sector, and users and carers. The aim of the project was to develop a shared philosophy of care based on promoting independence and from this to identify the components of a spectrum of care that would meet the wide range of needs of elders with mental ill health. The borough had high levels of deprivation, unemployment and poor housing.

Do male and female carers have different approaches to the caring role? Tina Fear presents the results of her two small qualitative studies.

Undertaking a literature review revealed that when evaluating the effectiveness of the drug treatments for dementia few studies purposefully explore the views of users and carers. Their views are mainly derived from secondary analysis of conventional scientific evidence. Where the views of users and carers were explored it was discovered that they evaluate the effectiveness of the drug treatments in terms of quality of life.

Many different definitions of the concept of quality of life (QOL) are found in the literature. This raises the question as to which domains are viewed as really important by people with dementia and which are possibly based on views of others, such as (in)formal carers, or theoretical models. An explorative study was carried out among people with dementia living in the community and in nursing homes. Their opinions were compared to those of professional carers and to the current theoretical models and instruments for QOL in dementia.