Pollock, Kristian

Background: Managing medications can impose difficulties for patients and families which may intensify towards the end of life. Family caregivers are often assumed to be willing and able to support patients with medications, yet little is known about the challenges they experience or how they cope with these. Aim: To explore patient and family caregivers’ views of managing medications when someone is seriously ill and dying at home.

Background: In the current ecology of care, social, rather than medical, support is critical in enabling frail older people to live at home. Objectives: This paper reports findings from a qualitative study about how home care workers (HCWs) support persons with dementia living in the community. Methods: Semi-structured qualitative interviews were carried out in England with 14 family care-givers (FCGs) recruited from a single private home care provider. A thematic analysis of the data was undertaken using the constant comparative method.

Background: Mental health recovery narratives have been defined as first-person lived experience accounts of recovery from mental health problems which refer to events or actions over a period of time and which include elements of adversity or struggle, and also self-defined strengths, successes or survival. They are readily available in invariant recorded form, including text, audio or video. Previous studies have provided evidence that receiving recorded recovery narratives can provide benefits to recipients.

Context. Increased life expectancy, technical advances in treatment and symptom control, and the extension of palliative care in community settings not only lengthen life but also make it possible for many patients to be cared for, and to die, at home. Moreover, death increasingly occurs in late old age and after a prolonged period of comorbidity and/or frailty.