Background: Many organizations are faced with growing numbers of employees who combine their jobs with informal caregiving responsibilities. To support working caregivers in maintaining a good balance between work, private life and informal care, a workplace participatory approach (PA) intervention was implemented in four Dutch organizations. This study's aims were to evaluate the degree of PA implementation, contextual factors influencing implementation, and stakeholder experiences with the PA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Dement
September 2024
Introduction: Developing sustainable health policy requires an understanding of the future demand for health and social care. We explored the characteristics of the 65+ population in the Netherlands in 2020 and 2040, focusing on two factors that determine care needs: (1) the occurrence of complex health problems and (2) the availability of resources to manage health and care (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe concept of resilience, i.e., the capacity of a system to bounce back after a stressor, is gaining interest across many fields of science, policy, and practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Countries are adapting their health and social care systems to better meet the needs of growing populations with (multiple) chronic conditions. To guide this process, assessment of the 'patient experience' is becoming increasingly important. For this purpose, the Person-Centred Coordinated Care Experience Questionnaire (P3CEQ) was developed in the United Kingdom, and translated into several languages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe culture change movement within long-term care in which radical changes in the physical, social and organizational care environments are being implemented provides opportunities for the development of innovative long-term care facilities. The aim of this study was to investigate which competencies care staff working at green care farms and other innovative types of small-scale long-term dementia care facilities require, according to care staff themselves and managers, and how these competencies were different from those of care staff working in more traditional large-scale long-term dementia care facilities. A qualitative descriptive research design was used.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Informal carers are increasingly relied on for support by older people and the health and social care systems that serve them. It is therefore important that health and social care professionals are knowledgeable about and responsive to informal carers' needs. This study explores informal carers' own needs within the context of caregiving; and examines, from the informal carers' perspective, the extent to which professionals assess, understand and are responsive to informal carers' needs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
May 2021
Many informal caregivers of older adults combine their caregiving tasks with a paid job. Adequate support is important to enable them to combine paid work with caregiving, while maintaining their health and wellbeing. To date, however, knowledge about working caregivers' support needs is fragmented.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the Netherlands, there is a growing need for collective housing for older people to bridge the gap between ageing-in-place and institutional care facilities. Participation of older people in the concept and design phases is important to tune the market supply to the needs of (future) residents, yet social entrepreneurs find it challenging to involve older people. This commentary explores various ways older people can participate in the development of new housing initiatives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Frailty can be seen as a continuum, from fit to frail. While many recent studies have focused on frailty, much less attention has been paid to the other end of the continuum: the group of older adults that remain (relatively) vital. Moreover, there is a lack of studies on frailty and vitality that investigate predictors from multiple domains of functioning simultaneously.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: While many different factors can undermine older people's ability to live safely at home, safety as an explicit aspect of integrated care for older people living at home is an underexplored topic in research. In the context of a European project on integrated care, this study aims to improve our understanding of how safety is addressed in integrated care practices across Europe.
Methods: This multiple case study included thirteen integrated care sites from seven European countries.
Background: Despite many studies evaluating the effectiveness of integrated care, evidence remains inconsistent. There is increasing commentary pointing out the mismatch between the ability to capture the somewhat 'illusive' impact of integrated care initiatives and programmes, and the most appropriate way to do this. Focusing on methodology, this paper describes and critically reviews the experiences of SUSTAIN, a Horizon 2020 funded project (2015-2019) with the purpose of advancing knowledge and understanding of cross-European integrated care evaluation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Although person-centredness is a key principle of integrated care, successfully embedding and improving person-centred care for older people remains a challenge. In the context of a cross-European project on integrated care for older people living at home, the objective of this paper is to provide insight at an overarching level, into activities aimed at improving person-centredness within the participating integrated care sites. The paper describes experiences with these activities from the service providers' and service users' perspectives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is growing recognition that traditional dementia care models fall short for people with dementia and their family caregivers. This has led to a call for new dementia care approaches. In response to this call, innovations in long-term dementia care are taking place both in the community and in residential care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Many older people live at home, often with complex and chronic health and social care needs. Integrated care programs are increasingly being implemented as a way to better address these needs. To support older people living at home, it is also essential to maintain their safety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntegrated care programmes are increasingly being put in place to provide care to older people living at home. However, knowledge about further improving integrated care is limited. In fourteen integrated care sites in Europe, plans to improve existing ways of working were designed, implemented and evaluated to enlarge the understanding of what works and with what outcomes when improving integrated care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn response to growing populations of citizens with multiple chronic conditions, integrated care models are being implemented in many countries. Based on our experiences from three EU co-funded actions (ICARE4EU, SUSTAIN, JA-CHRODIS), we notice that users' experiences are not always taken into account when assessing the quality of integrated care, whereas research shows that it is in this particular domain that quality improvement is most evident. The greatest value of integrated care for people with multiple chronic conditions may not lie in its potential to improve their health or reduce their use of services, but in its potential to improve their care experience, by strengthening person-centred decision-making and delivering care and support accordingly.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn many integrated care programs, a comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) is conducted to identify older people's problems and care needs. Different ways for conducting a CGA are in place. However, it is still unclear which CGA instruments and procedures for conducting them are used in integrated care programs, and what distinguishes them from each other.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Integrated care programmes are increasingly being put in place to provide care to older people who live at home. Knowledge of how to further develop integrated care and how to transfer successful initiatives to other contexts is still limited. Therefore, a cross-European research project, called Sustainable Tailored Integrated Care for Older People in Europe (SUSTAIN), has been initiated with a twofold objective: 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: ABSTRACTBackground:People with dementia at green care farms (GCFs) are physically more active, have more social interactions, are involved in a larger variety of activities, and come outdoors more often than those in other long-term dementia care settings. These aspects may positively affect health and well-being. This study explored which and how characteristics of GCFs could be implemented in other long-term dementia care settings, taking into account possible facilitators and barriers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Accumulation of problems in physical, psychological, cognitive, or social functioning is characteristic for frail individuals. Using a four-domain approach of frailty, this study explored how sociodemographic and lifestyle factors, life events and health are associated with frailty.
Methods: The study sample included 4019 men and women (aged 40-81 years) examined during the fifth round (2008-2012) of the Doetinchem Cohort Study.
Background: A wide range of initiatives on early detection and intervention have been developed to proactively identify problems related to health and wellbeing in (frail) older people, with the aim of supporting them to live independently for as long as possible. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what the best way is to design such initiatives and how older people's needs and preferences can be best addressed. This study aimed to address this gap in the literature by exploring: 1) older people's perspectives on health and living environment in relation to living independently at home; 2) older people's needs and preferences in relation to initiating and receiving care and support; and 3) professionals' views on what would be necessary to enable the alignment of early detection initiatives with older people's own needs and preferences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe explore the role of farm animals in providing care to different types of participants at care farms (e.g., youngsters with behavioural problems, people with severe mental problems and people with dementia).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Despite the expected beneficial effects on quality of care, patient involvement in diabetes care groups, which deliver a bundled paid integrated care programme for diabetes type 2, seems to be limited. The aim of this study was to gain insight into levels and methods of patient involvement, into facilitators and barriers, and into the future preferences of care groups and patient representatives.
Theory And Methods: Semi-structured interviews were held with 10 representatives of care groups and 11 representatives of patient advocacy groups.