Low-level support for socially isolated older people: An evaluation of telephone befriending

In May 2005 Help the Aged and Zurich Community Trust launched a two year national programme ‘A Call in Time’. The purpose of the programme was to provide low level support and befriending services via the telephone to older people who are lonely, isolated or vulnerable. Eight projects were funded across the country. Following the launch of the programme, Help the Aged commissioned the Centre for Health Promotion Research at Leeds Metropolitan University to undertake an evaluation of the programme and to investigate the direct impact of low level support on older people who are vulnerable, isolated or lonely using the telephone as a specific tool of befriending. The main objectives of the evaluation were to: * Measure and identify the effectiveness of telephone befriending services for older people with regards to their mental and physical well-being and their quality of life and the extent to which services were of preventive value. * Examine the components parts of each model of telephone befriending and identify ‘models of good practice’. All eight telephone befriending schemes functioning within a variety of different parameters were included in the evaluation. The participants in this research included project co-ordinators, project volunteers and older people who were in receipt of the services

Transport and Older People: Integrating Transport Planning Tools with User Needs

This study was funded through a pump-priming grant from the Strategic Promotion of Ageing Research Capacity (SPARC) programme. The purpose of the project was to bring together transport and public health research in order to demonstrate how the involvement of older people can help improve tools for transport planning. The study was unique in that it brought together public health and transport planning and engineering with older people to consider how services can be more responsive to older people’s transport needs. The project had five research objectives: 1. To investigate how accessibility problems impact on older people’s independence 2. To determine the extent to which currently available data sources and modelling tools reflect older people’s stated accessibility needs 3. To understand how the gap between expected and perceived accessibility problems varies across different categories of older people 4. To pilot techniques that could be applied to provide a more robust measure of accessibility for older people. 5. To build new research capacity across disciplines to develop a national focus on the interactions between ageing and transport planning. The methods were determined on the basis of ‘appropriate tools with maximum output’. Focus group interviews were selected as a useful tool for reaching a large number of older people within a limited time span, for providing an arena for discussion and debate about a topical subject and for generating ideas for improving transport planning. Following the interviews accompanied walks were undertaken with older people in a range of road environments and traffic situations. The purpose of these walks was to observe and explore the way older people interact with their environment. Data from the focus group interviews and the observations were compared with the outputs from an accessibility planning tool used by local authorities to plan accessible and acceptable transport routes (Accession™). The purpose of this exercise was to investigate whether or not such tools are able to take into account the varying needs of older people. The study was undertaken over eight months. Eighty one older people living in the Leeds district took part in the focus groups. They covered a broad range of mobility levels and used a variety of transport types, as such a reasonably rounded perspective on the issues concerned was offered. In addition six walks were undertaken with older people in their community

Interaction between clients and physiotherapists in group exercise classes in geriatric rehabilitation

The aim of this paper is to explore how older people construct their interaction in group exercise classes in geriatric rehabilitation and what is their contribution to the interaction. Discourse analysis was employed and data, consisting of seven videotaped group-based exercise sessions, were collected from 52 older people (aged 66–93 years) and nine rehabilitation professionals in seven rehabilitation centres. Four discourse categories were found. In “taciturn exercising”, older people remained verbally silent but physically active. In “submissive disagreeing”, older people opposed the professionals’ agenda by displaying reluctant consent to proposals. In “resilient endeavouring”, older adults persisted on their course of action, regardless of the disapproval of the professionals. In “lay helping”, older people initiated spontaneous encouragement, but also gave verbal and physical assistance to their peers. Older people's meaningful contribution to interaction, whilst it may challenge the institutional flow of activities, can constitute an integral part of the re-ablement process of rehabilitation

Primer Note: A novel set of EST-SSR markers in Tamarix: a resource to characterize this genus

AbstractBoth the negative and positive ecological impact of Tamarix plants is controversial, and thus a more comprehensive understanding is necessary. Tamarisks are invasive in many countries but the inter-specific transferability that characterizes simple sequence repeats (SSRs) could be harnessed to track the spread of specific genotypes or to study invasive populations. Thirteen polymorphic SSR markers, derived from expressed sequence tag (EST), were identified by first screening 26 samples of T. aphylla, T. jordanis, T. nilotica, and T. tetragyna and then 33 unidentified tamarisks from Yotvata, Israel. The mean number of alleles per locus ranged from two to 14 and the mean expected heterozygosity was 0.415. These EST-SSR markers will undoubtedly be useful in the genetic characterization of the genus Tamarix due to their high cross-species transferability which enables the estimation of the genetic diversity among and within different species, that are adapted to the same desert habitat under severe environmental constraints