Suchergebnisse

A review will be given of current developments in the UK of the increasingly recognised risks posed by financial abuse/financial scamming. Recent legislation, including the Care Act (2014) will be considered in terms of agency responsibility to protect vulnerable older adults at risk from financial scams. In particular there will be a focus on the implications for the financial industries such as retail banking and insurance, and how action in this area most vulnerable to financial scams. For example this may include an agreement that that organisations should only share information to other organisations via a clear opt in rather than opt out process to help avoid 'suckers lists', and that the banking sector should adopt a 24hour delay process on transactions above a defined threshold for those citizens who feel at risk of financial scamming. . Examples of research in the UK will be considered as well as the practical measures, in terms of partnerships and collaborations, which have been pursued to mitigate the prevalence and potential for financial abuse in the older population. These relationships include academic researchers working with Royal Mail, the police, social workers, trading standards organisations and others. Recommendations for interventions to reduce the prevalence and impact of financial abuse will be made.

The UK's departure from the European Union (Brexit) is likely to result in greater immigration and employment restrictions on European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) nationals within the United Kingdom. EU/EEA citizens constitute a significant proportion of the current social care workforce. Research evaluating the impact of Brexit on social care has highlighted potentially severe future workforce shortfalls, but has not engaged in detail with the experiences of social care personnel involved in day-to-day recruitment and retention activities. This article explores how social care managers evaluate Brexit's prospects for future workforce sustainability, through the prism of their organisation's workforce requirements. This qualitative study incorporated in-depth semi-structured interviews and questionnaire surveys with domiciliary and residential care managers. Data collection focused on an urban conurbation in south-west England, with demographic characteristics likely to make post-Brexit recruitment and retention in social care particularly challenging. A key finding is that, irrespective of whether they employ EU/EEA workers or not, research participants have deep concerns about Brexit's potential impact on the social care labour market. These include apprehensions about future restrictions on hiring EU/EEA nurses, as well as fears about increased competition for care staff and their organisation's future financial viability. This article amplifies the voices of managers as an under-researched group, bringing their perspectives on Brexit to bear on wider debates on social care workforce sustainability.

Narrative methods contribute greatly to the advances made in qualitative research. A narrative style should also be promoted in publications and presentations. A study on older LGBT citizens in rural Britain highlights this by means of a report on one part of that study—a Focus Group. The paper demonstrates two ways of writing Focus Group material for publication. First, "data bits" extracted from the transcript are embedded by interpretive categories. The authors ask, "How did this come about? Isn't it time to shift our approach and report these experiences in a different way? Was this not a story of the interactions of strangers and a growing social group cohesion that was taking place by means of this very research exercise?" Secondly, a large section of the Focus Group transcript is presented, including nuances such as breaks, how one person's thought follows another's, and the energy created when several people talk at once. Doing this without comment or interruption brings the reader closer to the group experience itself. The Focus Group provided a opportunity for participants to share a common history and identify individual experiences. Focus Groups can provide marginalised groups with an opportunity to collectively create new knowledge and understanding about shared cultural and historical experiences. Narrative researchers are natural storytellers and need to foreground this when reporting studies for publication. Qualitative research is always about story reporting and story making, and narrative research (listening to and retelling stories) is a key democratising factor in qualitative social science research.