Friday 23 August 2013

Hunt: employers burying heads in sands over care 'time bomb'

Workers who care for elderly parents should be allowed to choose their own working hours, the Health Secretary has said.

    

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Volunteering may help you live longer

Volunteering not only enriches the lives of others, it can also improve your physical and mental wellbeing. {DynamicContent:Social Media Buttons}   Researchers pooled a large amount of data from 40...

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Carers UK responds to new research highlighting crisis in care by 2032

New research by Dr Linda Pickard at the LSE published today shows that care is facing a crisis over the coming two decades.  This work serves as a stark warning to Government and society that more care must be provided or families will suffer.

The research shows that by 2017, we will have reached a tipping point in care when the demand from older people needing care will outstrip family members able to meet that need.  It warns that this "care gap" will increase rapidly over the next two decades.  By 2032, 1.1 million older people in England will need care from their families – an increase of 60% – but the number of people able to care for older parents will only increase by 20%. Dr Pickard predicts this will leave a shortfall of around 160,000 carers.

The research warns that families, and women in mid-life in particular, will be placed under huge pressure to juggle work and caring for older relatives, which the LSE says will create inequality in the workplace and could come at a big cost to the labour market.

HelĂ©na Herklots, Chief Executive of Carers UK, said: "As our ageing population leads to rapidly increasing demand for care, chronically underfunded social care services face substantial cuts.  This is leaving older and disabled people without the care they need and creating a new generation of families struggling to balance work, family life and caring for ageing relatives. The fastest growing group of carers is amongst older people themselves who are increasingly spending their retirements caring for ill partners or their own older parents."

There are currently 6.5 million carers throughout the UK and Carers UK/YouGov polling showed that 2.3 million people have given up work to care, many feeling that they had no other option but to do so.  Women are more likely to be impacted by caring during their working life – they have a 50:50 chance of providing substantial care by the time they are 59, compared with men who have the same chances by the time they are 74. 

A growing care gap? The supply of unpaid care for older people by their adult children in England to 2032 is published in Ageing and Society.

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Lifting the lid on care homes

This week the Care Inspectorate issued a hard hitting report about Pentland Hill Nursing Home in Edinburgh. Age Scotland’s Doug Anthoney responded. An unannounced inspection in July, which followed a significant number of complaints within the past year about the … Continue reading

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Man who stole life savings jailed

A man who stole an elderly pensioner's life savings after he died is jailed for 20 months.

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Prognosis of hospitalised older people with different levels of functioning: a prospective cohort study

Background: hospitalised older people are at risk for poor functioning after hospital discharge. We aimed to validate the predictive ability of the Identification Seniors At Risk-Hospitalized Patients (ISAR-HP) screening questionnaire to identify older patients at risk for functional dependence by comparing groups with different ISAR-HP scores on cognitive and physical functioning, mortality, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and loneliness.

Design: a longitudinal prospective cohort study.

Setting: a 450-bed hospital in the Netherlands.

Subjects: four hundred and sixty patients 65 years or older admitted between June 2010 and October 2010.

Methods: participants were classified into five risk groups at hospital admission using the ISAR-HP. We interviewed patients at hospital admission and at 3 and 12 months after admission using validated questionnaires to score HRQoL, physical functioning, cognitive functioning and loneliness. Differences in survival were quantified by a concordance statistic (c).

Results: cognitive functioning, physical functioning, loneliness and HRQoL differed significantly between groups during the 1-year follow-up after hospital admission (all comparisons P < 0.05), with high-risk groups having lower scores than low-risk groups for functioning and loneliness, although not always for HRQoL. The lowest risk group (ISAR-HP = 0) scored consistently higher on functioning and HRQoL than all other groups. Mortality differed significantly between groups (P < 0.001, c = 0.67).

Conclusions: the ISAR-HP can readily distinguish well-functioning older patients from patients with low functioning and low HRQoL after hospital admission. The ISAR-HP may hence assist in selecting patients who may benefit from individually tailored reactivation treatment that is provided next to treatment of their medical condition.

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Depression with diabetes may speed mental decline

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - In a study of middle-aged and older people with type 2 diabetes, declines in thinking and memory that are often linked to later dementia happened faster in those who were depressed compared to those who were not.        

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Hospital workers jailed for abusing female patients on Whipps Cross geriatric ward

Two healthcare assistants who abused elderly female patients on the geriatric ward of an under-fire hospital were jailed today.        

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News Archive

Visit the UK Web Archive to view archived news.

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'Mindless' vandals target OAP's garden

A PENSIONER has been left 'heartbroken' by vandals who she says have repeatedly damaged her garden.Police are investigating after 75-year-old Rosemary Wright's property was regularly targeted.In the most recent incident, the pensioner, of Elers Grove, in Middleport, says she was 'horrified' when she came home to find a chunk of her garden wall had been broken off and then thrown into her garden ...

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Two million older women offline

Around two million elderly women are missing out on the benefits of being online, a charity has warned.

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Older women remain least likely group to get online

Older women are the least likely group in society to use the internet, despite potentially having the most to gain from it, new statistics from the ONS reveal. {DynamicContent:Social Media Buttons}...

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