Crossing area and staff boundaries in wound care.

Staff working in hospitals, the community and nursing homes in the Fife area now meet in a forum to share their knowledge of wound care. The group is multidisciplinary and members bring experience from a variety of backgrounds.

Assessing continuing care needs: findings from the Fife Healthcare Assessment for Placement Project for elderly people.

Previous surveys of elderly patients in different continuing care settings suggest considerable overlap between settings. However, re-analysis of this data in terms of patients' profiles of dependency reveals a somewhat different picture, suggesting that overlap is not such a general phenomenon. Further data from new surveys in Fife confirm this view.

What do foster parents think of the natural parents? A comparative study.

By means of standardized case vignettes and rating scales, this study compared attitudes of short-term foster parents, professional social workers and parents in the general population respectively towards birth parents of abused children received into foster care. Significant differences arose between the foster parents and comparison groups on dimensions about issues relating to the desirability of foster care, restrictions on contact with birth parents and conditions under which the abused child might return to its family. Wide variation occurred both between individual foster parents and also in the degree of correspondence of views between the foster parents and each of the comparison groups on individual dimensions.