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Background : Britain's existing mental health legislation was introduced over 15 years ago. Since then, there has been considerable reorganisation of mental health care services but little research into the use of the Act in routine practice. Modernising Mental Health Services (1998) asserts that mental health legislation will be revised. Aim : The study investigates opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of Parts II and X of the Mental Health Act (1983) of those affected by it.

In France, a wide range of care and support services exist for community dwelling people with Alzheimer's disease (AD). These are coordinated by the general practitioner (GP). We investigated interventions that were ‘prescribed’ by French GPs and analysed their perceived barriers to arranging these. Thirty-nine percent of GPs responded to a postal survey, which was sent to 1105 physicians belonging to the Sentinel GP Research Network and to 524 GPs consulting in the Rhône-Alpes region of France.

This paper reports findings from an attitudinal survey towards telecare that emerged from 22 focus groups comprising 92 older people, 55 professional stakeholders and 39 carers. These were convened in three different regions of England as a precursor to telecare service development.

Study objective: The Italian Survey of the Dying of Cancer (ISDOC) was undertaken to evaluate the experiences of Italian people dying from cancer during their last three months of life in all settings of care. Study design: A two-stage probability sample was used to estimate end-of-life outcomes of about 160 000 Italian cancer deaths. In the first stage, 30 of the 197 Italian Local Health Districts (LHD) were randomly selected after stratification.

Objectives: Increasing attention has been paid to the needs of family members caring for a person with dementia but little has been written about the impact on the wider family. This paper was intended to see whether the need for information would stretch to those relatives living far from the patient.

Background: Given that carers of individuals with intellectual disability (ID) and carers of individuals with psychiatric disorders experience elevated levels of stress and psychological distress, carers of individuals with both ID and a comorbid psychiatric disorder are potentially at even greater risk for psychological difficulties. The aim of the present study was to investigate the psychological well-being of carers of adults with a dual diagnosis compared with carers of adults with intellectual disability alone.

To measure the experienced burden by informal carers (N=2.444), a 15-item Mokken scale has been developed. This concerns an extended version of the EDIZ (“Ervaren druk door Informele zorg”); several items refer to the pressure of time brought by the combination of labour and care and the consequences for the health of the informal carers are added to the EDIZ. We call this new scale the EDIZ-plus; it concerns a reliable one-dimensional and hierarchical scale which extends from 0 (no burden) to maximum 15 (severe burden).

Psychotropic medications are a treatment commonly used for people with learning disabilities. Legislation and guidance suggest that, for a person to give informed consent to treatment, they must have knowledge of the potential treatment. This study of 21 people with learning disabilities, and their carers and prescribers, living in four different regions of England, suggests that few of the people with learning disabilities were fully informed about their treatment.