Feasibility of school students Skyping care home residents to reduce loneliness.

Background: Intergenerational friendship has proved useful for older people in increasing socialisation. We explored the feasibility of school students Skyping older people in care homes with the long-term aim of reducing loneliness.

Methods: Six school students from one secondary school and twenty older people, including seven with mild to moderate dementia, from three care homes, engaged in Skype video-calls over six weeks.

Aesthetically Designing Video-Call Technology With Care Home Residents: A Focus Group Study.

Background: Video-calls have proven to be useful for older care home residents in improving socialization and reducing loneliness. Nonetheless, to facilitate the acceptability and usability of a new technological intervention, especially among people with dementia, there is a need for user-led design improvements. The current study conducted focus groups with an embedded activity with older people to allow for a person-centered design of a video-call intervention.

Video-calls to reduce loneliness and social isolation within care environments for older people: an implementation study using collaborative action research.

Background: Older people in care may be lonely with insufficient contact if families are unable to visit. Face-to-face contact through video-calls may help reduce loneliness, but little is known about the processes of engaging people in care environments in using video-calls. We aimed to identify the barriers to and facilitators of implementing video-calls for older people in care environments.

Evaluating a dementia learning community: exploratory study and research implications.

Background: Access times for, the costs and overload of hospital services are an increasingly salient issue for healthcare managers in many countries. Rising demand for hospital care has been attributed partly to unplanned admissions for older people, and among these partly to the increasing prevalence of dementia. The paper makes a preliminary evaluation of the logic model of a Dementia Learning Community (DLC) intended to reduce unplanned hospital admissions from care homes of people with dementia.

Patterns and impact of comorbidity and multimorbidity among community-resident American Indian elders.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to suggest a new approach to identifying patterns of comorbidity and multimorbidity.

Design And Methods: A random sample of 1,039 rural community-resident American Indian elders aged 60 years and older was surveyed. Comorbidity was investigated with four standard approaches, and with cluster analysis.