How assisted eating becomes a caring practice in institutional settings: Embodied gestures and stages of assisted eating.

Assisted eating is a basic caring practice and the means through which many individuals receive adequate nutrition. Research in this area has noted the challenges of helping others to eat while upholding their independence, though has yet to explicate how this caring practice is achieved in detail and across the lifespan. This paper provides an empirical analysis of assisted eating episodes in two different institutions, detailing the processes through which eating is collaboratively achieved between two persons.

Patterns of long-term care utilization during the last five years of life among Swedish older adults with and without dementia.

Aims: The aims of this study were to compare the patterns of long-term care (LTC) use (no care, homecare, residential care) among people with and without dementia aged 70+ in Sweden during their last five years of life and its association with sociodemographic factors (age, gender, education, cohabitation status) and time with a dementia diagnosis.

Methods: This retrospective cohort study included all people who died in November 2019 aged 70 years and older (n = 6294) derived from several national registers. A multinomial logistic regression was conducted to identify which sociodemographic factors predicted the patterns of LTC use.

Supporting people living with dementia in novel joint activities: Managing tablet computers.

A bourgeoning number of studies have demonstrated that people living with dementia are capable of participating in a wide range of everyday activities when supported by care professionals or family carers. However, little remains known about the situated practices used by carers to support people living with dementia as active co-participants in novel joint activities. Taking the use of tablet computers as an example, this study focuses on the interactional organization of instructions in joint activities involving people living with dementia, who have no previous experiences of touchscreen technologies, and their carers.

Intercorporeal collaboration: Staging, parsing, and embodied directives in dementia care.

This study shows how concerted bodily movements and particularly intercorporeality play a central role in interaction, particularly in joint activities with people with late-stage dementia. Direct involvement of bodies in care situations makes intercorporeal collaboration the basic form for engaging with people with late-stage dementia. By detailed analysis of a videorecording of a joint activity involving a person with late-stage dementia as an example, we show that the process of concerted bodily movements includes not only an interactive bodywork but also a reconfiguration of the routine activities and actions in situ.

Long-term care use among people living with dementia: a retrospective register-based study from Sweden.

Background: Although many people with dementia need progressive support during their last years of life little is known to what extent they use formal long-term care (LTC). This study investigates the use of LTC, including residential care and homecare, in the month preceding death, as well as the number of months spent in residential care, among Swedish older decedents with a dementia diagnosis, compared with those without a dementia diagnosis.

Methodology: This retrospective cohort study identified all people who died in November 2019 in Sweden aged 70 years and older (n = 6294).