Search results for ‘Subject term:"older people"’ Sort:
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Supporting older families: making a real difference
- Author:
- MAGRILL Dalia
- Publisher:
- Mental Health Foundation
- Publication year:
- 2005
- Pagination:
- 107p.
- Place of publication:
- London
Older families are a priority group for support, but it is important that their needs are linked in to the mainstream agendas of services for people with learning disabilities, older people and carers generally. It is important that we make sure that older families have their needs met now, and are supported to remain together for as long as they wish whilst planning for the future with confidence. However, it is equally important that we get things right for older families now so that others who are growing older do not face the same anxieties, uncertainty and fears that so many older family carers have lived with for decades.
Time for care: exploring time use by carers of older people
- Authors:
- BOWES Alison, DAWSON Alison, ASHWORTH Rosalie
- Journal article citation:
- Ageing and Society, 40(8), 2020, pp.1735-1758.
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
The paper focuses on temporal aspects of informal caring for older people. Limitations of large-scale surveys in capturing such data are noted and time-use methodology, despite its own limitations, is proposed as a promising alternative. Adopting a critical perspective on time that includes carers’ own conceptualisations, we report the findings of a qualitative study of carers’ time use. Sixty-two interviews with carers, male/female, co-resident/not co-resident, employed/not employed, and located across Great Britain were conducted. Analysis considered people's own diverse and ambiguous views of their care activities. Carers’ accounts of their time revealed non-linear experiences and a sense of being permanently on call. Interviewees often travelled distances to engage in support activities with or for older people. Changes over time were pervasive, increasing or reducing care requirements. Unanticipated events could precipitate radical changes in time use. Managing time, exercising temporal agency, was particularly apparent in accounts of care, employment, other family responsibilities and choices about friendship. Measurement of carers’ time use which draws on the conceptual foundation of carers’ own perspectives on time may provide more effective quantitative understanding of the temporal aspects of caring. It should not pre-define time, must grasp a variety of tasks, take account of intermittent activity, incorporate the 24–7 experience of many carers and demonstrate how caring time interacts with other time. (Publisher abstract)
The impact of formal care on informal care for people over 75 in England
- Authors:
- SALONIKI Eirini, et al
- Publisher:
- University of Kent. Personal Social Services Research Unit
- Publication year:
- 2019
- Pagination:
- 18
- Place of publication:
- Canterbury
This study explores how formal care provision in the form of home help affects the receipt of informal care from within and outside the household for people over 75 years old. The study uses data from the British Household Panel Survey between 1991 and 2009. The study uses a number of instruments to address the potential endogeneity of formal care. It examines whether instrumentation with a ‘spatial lag’ formal care utilisation variable is possible in the informal-formal care setting. Additionally it takes advantage of the care eligibility criteria, as set out in the Care and Support Act (2014), and uses them as a proxy for years prior to 2014 to construct a novel care eligibility instrument, relying on the non-linearity property of this indicator. The results find a negative and statistically significant effect of formal care on informal care from within the household, suggesting a substantial degree of substitutability between these two modes of care. With regards to informal care provided from outside the household, although the effect is still negative, the degree of substitutability is substantially smaller and mostly not statistically significant. These findings support current discussions and policies towards the implementation of an integrated care system where services designed to meet not only the individual’s needs but also give the person the necessary control and access over these services. The findings also provide grounds for estimates of savings in the cost of informal care enabled by spending on formal care. (Edited publisher abstract)
Shared homes as an alternative to nursing home care: impact of VA’s Medical Foster Home program on hospitalization
- Authors:
- LEVY Cari R., et al
- Journal article citation:
- Gerontologist, 56(1), 2016, pp.62-71.
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
Purpose: This study compares hospitalisation rates for common conditions in the Veteran Affairs (VA) Medical Foster Home (MFH) programme where a non-family caregiver provides personal care in their own home to VA nursing homes, known as Community Living Centers (CLCs). Design and Methods: The study used a nested, matched, case control design. It examined 817 MFH residents and matched each to 3 CLC residents selected from a pool of 325,031. CLC and MFH cases were matched on (a) baseline time period, (b) follow-up time period, (c) age, (d) gender, (e) race, (f) risk of mortality calculated from comorbidities, and (g) history of hospitalization for the selected condition during the baseline period. Odds ratio (OR) and related confidence interval (CI) were calculated to contrast MFH cases and matched CLC controls. Results: Compared with matched CLC cases, MFH residents were less likely to be hospitalised for adverse care events, anxiety disorders, mood disorders, skin infections, pressure ulcers and bacterial infections other than tuberculosis or septicemia. MFH cases and matched CLC controls did not differ in rates of urinary tract infections, pneumonia, septicemia, suicide/self-injury, falls, other injury besides falls, history of injury, delirium/dementia/cognitive impairments, or adverse drug events. Hospitalisation rates were not higher for any conditions studied in the MFH cohort compared with the CLC cohort. Implications: MFH participants had the same or lower rates of hospitalisations for conditions examined compared with CLC controls suggesting that noninstitutional care by a nonfamilial caregiver does not increase hospitalisation rates for common medical conditions. (Edited publisher abstract)
Services for supporting family carers of older dependent people in Europe: characteristics, coverage and usage: the trans-European survey report
- Authors:
- EUROFAMCARE CONSORTIUM, (ed.)
- Publisher:
- EUROFAMCARE
- Publication year:
- 2006
- Pagination:
- 260p.
- Place of publication:
- Hamburg
A major concern of the EUROFAMCARE study is to analyse services for supporting family carers of older people in Europe. The needs and demands for services from the family carers perspective were obtained by face-to-face interviews with family carers at their home. The purpose of the Service Providers' Survey was to add the views of service providers to those of the family carers. The intention of further analysis is to describe possible differences in the views on service provision between those persons who receive help and those who offer it, i.e. completing the picture of two different views on help services and their existence, familiarity, availability, usage and acceptability. Furthermore the current and future perspectives on challenges concerning the services provided for carers of older people was conducted, to identify gaps in service provision and to show examples of good practice through the eyes of the providers.
Implementing community care: is there really more choice?
- Author:
- LEECE Janet
- Journal article citation:
- Generations Review, 5(2), June 1995, pp.2-5.
- Publisher:
- British Society of Gerontology
Details findings from a study in 1994, undertaken for an MA in Gerontology at Keele, which looked at the experiences of the reforms, for a group of people in a county in the North West of England. It discusses the issues involved in achieving more choice for older people and concludes that in the county studied, client choice appears not to have increased, and in some areas of provision choice has actually decreased.
Why do spouses provide personal care? A study among care-receiving Dutch community-dwelling older adults
- Authors:
- SWINKELS Joukje C., et al
- Journal article citation:
- Health and Social Care in the Community, 30(4), 2022, pp.e953-e961.
- Publisher:
- Wiley
This study investigates under what conditions older spouses receive personal care from their spouse. Whether spousal care is provided is determined by individual and societal factors related to informal and formal care provision. Individual factors concern the need for care (the care recipient's health status), the spouse's ability to provide care (the spouse's health status) and the quality of the marital bond. Societal factors reflect changing policies on long-term care (indicated by the year in which care started) and gender role socialisation (gender). From the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam, which completed eight observations between 1996 and 2016, we selected 221 independently living married respondents, aged 59-93, who received personal care for the first time and had at least one previous measurement without care use. The results show that if an older adult received personal care, the likelihood of receiving that care from the spouse decreased over the years: from 80% in 1996 to 50% in 2016. A husband or wife was less likely to receive spousal care when the spouse was unable to provide care or the quality of the relationship was low. No gender differences were found in either the prevalence of spousal care use or in the factors associated with that use. Thus, individual factors and the societal context seem to determine whether one receives personal care from their spouse. The decline in the likelihood of personal care provision from a spouse over the years may indicate a crumbling of family solidarity, an unmeasured and growing inability of the older spouse to provide care or an increasing complexity of care needs that requires the use of formal care. As care-giving can be a chronic stressor and most spouses provide care without assistance from others, attention from policy makers is needed to sustain the well-being of older couples. (Edited publisher abstract)
Cognition in informal caregivers: evidence from an English population study
- Authors:
- GARCIA-CASTRO F. Javier, et al
- Journal article citation:
- Aging and Mental Health, 26(3), 2022, pp.507-518.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
Background and objectives: The relationship between caregiving and cognition remains unclear. We investigate this association comparing four cognitive tasks and exploring the role of potential explanatory pathways such as healthy behaviours (healthy caregiver hypothesis) and depression (stress process model). Research design and methods: Respondents were from English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) (N = 8910). Cognitive tasks included immediate and delayed word recall, verbal fluency and serial 7 subtraction. Series of hierarchical linear regressions were performed. Adjustments included socio-demographics, health related variables, health behaviours and depression. Results: Being a caregiver was positively associated with immediate and delayed recall, verbal fluency but not with serial 7. For immediate and delayed recall, these associations were partially attenuated when adjusting for health behaviours, and depression. For verbal fluency, associations were partially attenuated when adjusting for depression but fully attenuated when adjusting for health behaviours. No associations were found for serial 7. Discussion and implications: the findings show that caregivers have higher level of memory and executive function compared to non-caregivers. For memory, we found that although health behaviours and depression can have a role in this association, they do not fully explain it. However, health behaviours seem to have a clear role in the association with executive function. Public health and policy do not need to target specifically cognitive function but other areas as the promotion of healthy behaviours and psychological adjustment such as preventing depression and promoting physical activity in caregivers. (Edited publisher abstract)
Social care for older people: the role and function of direct payments
- Author:
- DAVEY Vanessa
- Publisher:
- London School of Economics and Political Science
- Publication year:
- 2018
- Pagination:
- 290
- Place of publication:
- London
Direct payments (DPs) are now a core route for publicly funded social care provision in the UK. DPs are allocated to meet needs of social care recipients in lieu of community-managed social care services. DP recipients must organize their own care even if external support is usually available for some tasks. There are long-standing concerns about the benefits of direct payments for older people. Perceived risk factors include frailty, limited social networks, a lack of information technology skills, spouse co-morbidity, overburdened unpaid carers. Little is known about how direct payments actually work for older people. This thesis investigates direct payments practice, analysing newly collected and previous data from a variety of perspectives. First, a general view on policy and practice developments is obtained by tracing the evolution of DP support in the past decade. A bottom-up perspective follows, analysing interviews with 82 older people receiving DPs. The unprecedented detail given by this data permits the identification of factors associated with greater gain from DPs and exploration of how DP-care fits within pre-existing patterns of care, both formal and informal. Two particular phenomena highlight the unique role of DPs. The first is the role of husband and wife teams. In these husbands, affected by chronic physical illness, provide very substantial levels of unpaid care. As the term suggests, the couples operated DPs as a team: a mechanism which enhanced their ability to manage. Direct payments were critical to increase these couples' health and social capital. The second explores the circumstances of working unpaid carers managing DPs for older people. Overstretched and overburdened, these carers still found multiple benefits from DPs, not least the ability to coordinate care with their employment, ensuring the quality of services and with it their peace of mind. The work contributes to understanding how directing care through DPs fits in a continuum in which unpaid carers interact with formal care in any caregiving scenario. Directing care represents an additional phase in adaptation to dependence. Resilience is viewed as a confluence of individual, social, physical and environmental factors. For those with the most complex or precarious caregiving role, increased control may have the greatest benefits. (Edited publisher abstract)
Sustainable care: theorising the wellbeing of caregivers to older persons
- Authors:
- KEATING Norah, MCGREGOR J. Allister, YEANDLE Sue
- Journal article citation:
- International Journal of Care and Caring, 5(4), 2021, pp.611-630.
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
The term ‘care crisis’ is invoked to denote chronic system failures and bad outcomes for the people involved. This paper presents a comprehensive wellbeing framework and illustrate its practicality with evidence of negative outcomes for those who provide care. This study finds evidence of substantial material and relational wellbeing failures for family carers and for care workers, while there has been little interest in carers’ views of their ability to live the life that they most value. Understanding and improving wellbeing outcomes for carers is an essential component of sustainable care, which requires the wellbeing of the different actors in care arrangements. (Edited publisher abstract)