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Objective Safety is essential to support independent living among the rising number of people with long-term healthcare and social care needs. Safety performance in home care leans heavily on the capacity of unlicensed staff to respond to problems and changes in the older patients' functioning and health. The aim of this study is to explore assistant nurses' adaptive responses to everyday work to ensure safe care in the home care context. Design A qualitative approach using the drama-based learning and reflection technique forum play with subsequent group interviews. The audio-recorded interviews were transcribed and analysed with thematic analysis. Setting Home care services organisations providing care to older people in their private homes in two municipalities in southern Sweden.Participants Purposeful sampling of 24 assistant nurses and three managers from municipal home care services and a local geriatric hospital clinic. Results Home care workers' adaptive responses to provide safe home care were driven by an ambition to 'make it work in the best interests of the person' by adjusting to and accommodating care recipient needs and making autonomous decisions that expanded the room for manoeuvrability, while weighing risks of a trade-off between care standards and the benefits for the community-dwelling older people's independent living. Adaptations to ensure information transfer and knowledge acquisition across disciplines and borders required reciprocity. Conclusions Safety performance in home care service is dependent on the staff closest to the older people, who deal with safety risks and ethical dilemmas on a day-to-day basis and their access to information, competence, and resources that fit the demands. A proactive leadership characterised by mutual trust and adequate support for decision making is suggested. Managers and decision-makers across healthcare and social care need to consider how they can develop interprofessional collaborations and adaptive routines supporting safety from a broader ...

Background Nowadays, self-reported assessments (SA) and accelerometer-based assessments (AC) are commonly used methods to measure daily life physical activity (PA) in older adults. SA is simple, cost-effective, and can be used in large epidemiological studies, but its reliability and validity have been questioned. Accelerometer measurement has proven valid to provide accurate and reliable measurement of everyday life physical activities regarding frequency, duration, and intensity in older populations, but is expensive and requires a long-time measurement. Here is, furthermore, a lack of well-defined and reliable accelerometer cut-off points to measure PA among older adults. Therefore, there is a need to develop a simple and reliable method to complement/replace self-assessment methods of daily life physical activity and facilitate the future development of cut-off points to measure daily life physical activities among older adults. In this study, we explore how skeleton avatar technology (SAT) can be used to measure PA among older adults. Objectives 1. To explore the association between accelerometer data and self-reported assessment data of daily life physical activities in older adults, and 2. To explore how the SAT of a standardized functional (balance) test can be used to measure daily life physical activity among older adults. Method The correlation analysis was used to explore the association between response variables, and deep neural networks were used to predict the response variables (AC and SA outcomes). Results The results indicate that there is a moderate (r = 0.31) significant (p = 0.029) correlation between AC of PA and SA of PA. The functional balance test assessed with SAT was able to predict AC with 3.89% Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and SA with 11.07% MAE. Conclusion Overall, these results indicate that one functional balance test measured with SAT can be used to predict PA outcomes measured with accelerometer devices. SAT can predict PA outcomes better than SA outcomes within the same ...

Background: Health and social services provided at home are becoming increasingly important. Hence, there is a need for information on home care in Europe. The objective of this literature review was to respond to this need, by systematically describing what has been reported on home care in Europe in the scientific literature over the past decade. Methods: A systematic literature search was performed for papers on home care published in English, using the following data bases: Cinahl, the Cochrane Library, Embase, Medline, PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts, and Social Care Online. Studies were only included if they complied with the definition of home care, were published between January 1998 and October 2009, and dealt with at least one of the 31 specified countries. Clinical interventions, instrument developments, local projects and reviews were excluded. The data extracted included: the characteristics of the study and aspects of home care 'policy & regulation', 'financing', 'organisation & service delivery', and 'clients & informal carers'. Results: Seventy-four out of 5,133 potentially relevant studies met the inclusion criteria, providing information on 18 countries. Many focused on the characteristics of home care recipients and on the organisation of home care. Geographical inequalities, market forces, quality and integration of services were also among the issues frequently discussed. Conclusions: It can be concluded that home care systems appeared to differ not just between but also within countries. The papers included, however, provided only a limited picture of home care. Many studies only focused on one aspect of the home care system and international comparative studies were rare. Furthermore, little information emerged on home care financing and on home care in general in Eastern Europe. This review clearly shows the need for more scientific publications on home care, especially papers comparing countries. A comprehensive and more complete insight into the state of home care in Europe requires gathering of information using a uniform framework and methodology. ; This is an open access journal and the full article is available: 10.1186/1472-6963-11-207

Background: Health and social services provided at home are becoming increasingly important. Hence, there is a need for information on home care in Europe. The objective of this literature review was to respond to this need, by systematically describing what has been reported on home care in Europe in the scientific literature over the past decade. Methods: A systematic literature search was performed for papers on home care published in English, using the following data bases: Cinahl, the Cochrane Library, Embase, Medline, PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts, and Social Care Online. Studies were only included if they complied with the definition of home care, were published between January 1998 and October 2009, and dealt with at least one of the 31 specified countries. Clinical interventions, instrument developments, local projects and reviews were excluded. The data extracted included: the characteristics of the study and aspects of home care 'policy & regulation', 'financing', 'organisation & service delivery', and 'clients & informal carers'. Results: Seventy-four out of 5,133 potentially relevant studies met the inclusion criteria, providing information on 18 countries. Many focused on the characteristics of home care recipients and on the organisation of home care. Geographical inequalities, market forces, quality and integration of services were also among the issues frequently discussed. Conclusions: It can be concluded that home care systems appeared to differ not just between but also within countries. The papers included, however, provided only a limited picture of home care. Many studies only focused on one aspect of the home care system and international comparative studies were rare. Furthermore, little information emerged on home care financing and on home care in general in Eastern Europe. This review clearly shows the need for more scientific publications on home care, especially papers comparing countries. A comprehensive and more complete insight into the ...