Suchergebnisse

While care of older people involves both medical and social care nursing homes are essentially an extension of the functions of the home rather than of a hospital. The largest group of employees in residential care settings are nurses and care attendants. A medical model could be said to dominate not a social care approach. However there has been a move away from large institutional settings with a hospital atmosphere to smaller more homely units where there is more emphasis on purposive activity and links with the community. Traditionally many of the day services for older people were provided by voluntary organisations and nuns from religious orders provided much of the expertise. With the decline in the number of religious these services are increasingly coming under the remit of the health board and staffed by people from a variety of nursing and social care backgrounds. This articlel is based on an exploratory study of the provision of care for older people in residential and day settings with particular focus on recreational, social and creative activities. The services and programmes examined were mainly in the Dublin area. The aims of the article are: To outline the structure of provision of residential and day services for older people who need additional support in daily living. To give an overview of policy development in relation to these services. To examine quality of life in relation to provision of recreational and social activities in these services and To put forward an argument for social care education in the provision of training courses for staff working with older people. The article outlines the main institutional services for dependent older people, discusses the principal policy reports that have shaped the services, and describes the historical evolution of services and the main policy developments to date. The article contrasts services based on older concepts of care with more recent practices. The quality of care is examined with reference to legislative requirements and quality indictors particularly related to purposive recreation. The characteristics of a medical model of care are contrasted with a social care approach and an argument is advanced for adopting a social care approach for meeting the needs of the dependent older person. Finally the training implications of adopting a social care approach are considered.

This booklet highlights and celebrates the research work of graduates from taught Masters programmes in the School of Social Sciences and Law: • the MA in Criminology • the MA in Law • the MA in Child, Family and Community Studies • the International Masters in Early Childhood Education, co-delivered with Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences (Norway) and the University of Malta (Malta). The MA in Criminology and the MA in Law commenced in 2006 and the MA in Child, Family and Community Studies commenced in 2007. Each has quickly become established in its field as a popular, exciting and challenging course of study. The International Masters in Early Childhood Education (funded by the European Union's Erasmus Mundus Programme) has attracted student cohorts from all over the world and has provided a rich learning environment for students, who spend a semester each in Oslo, Dublin and Malta. Contained herein are the abstracts of selected theses from the four programmes, some details on the researchers and information on where to find the full text of each thesis, many of which are available online at our Institute Repository, Arrow@DIT (http://arrow.dit.ie/). This is the second edition of our Booklet of Selected Theses series, and it celebrates graduates from 2010-2013. Having online access to full thesis text will be of considerable value to other researchers, to our current cohort of students and to prospective students on these MA programmes. Each of these theses has been judged to be at a very high academic standard. Many shine a spotlight on little researched aspects of Irish society and provide empirical recommendations for policy makers and future researchers. We are hopeful that highlighting graduates' research in this way may encourage them to further develop their work for publication in peer review journals. We wish to congratulate our graduates on their achievements – the abstracts presented here are a small representation of the many long hours of work and study which produced the final theses. We wish them well in their future research and professional careers. We would like to thank colleagues for help in producing this booklet. Joanne Boyle for typing, formatting and chasing up all the parts that make up this document; and Ralph Murphy for uploading the theses to Arrow. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the commitment and dedication to academic rigour of the thesis supervisors and all our colleagues who lecture on these programmes. Dr Matt Bowden, Programme Chair, MA in CriminologyDr Carmel Gallagher, Programme Chair, MA in Child, Family and Community StudiesDr Kevin Lalor, Head of School of Social Sciences and Law April 2013

How can we understand older people as real human beings, value their wisdom, and appreciate that their norms and purposes both matter in themselves and are affected by those of others? Using a life-course approach, Valuing older people argues that the complexity and potential creativity of later life demand a humanistic vision of older people and ageing. It acknowledges the diversity of experiences of older age and presents a range of contexts and methodologies through which they can be understood. Ageing is a process of creating meaning carried out by older people, and is significant for those around them. This book, therefore, considers the impact of social norms and political and economic structures on older people's capacities to age in creative ways. What real obstacles are there to older people's construction of meaningful lives? What is being achieved when they feel they are ageing well? This collection, aimed at students, researchers, practitioners and policy-makers, offers a lively and constructive response to contemporary challenges involving ageing and how to understand it