13,889 research outputs found
Measuring quality in social care services: theory and practice
Measuring and assessing service quality in the social care sector presents distinct challenges. The 'experience' good properties of social care, for instance, and the large influence played by subjective judgements about the quality of personal relationships between carer and user and of process-related service characteristics make it difficult to develop indicators of service quality, including those of service impact on final outcomes. Using some of the key features of the 'Production of Welfare' approach, the paper discusses recent developments in the UK of the theoretical and practical frameworks used for assessing quality in social care and for understanding the final impact of services on the wellbeing of their recipients. Key current and future challenges to the development of such frameworks include difficulties in disentangling the impact of social care services on final outcomes from the often dominating effects of other, non-service related factors, and the generalization of consumer-directed care models and of the 'personalization' of care services. These challenges are discussed in the context of the different possible applications of quality indicators, including their role as supporting the service commissioning process and their use for assessing the performance of service providers
Using a ‘wellbeing’ cost-effectiveness approach to improve resource allocation in social care
The promotion of wellbeing is the newly-stated guiding principle for the long-term care (social care) system in England. It signals a shift away from a focus on care need ‘deficits’ approach. Such a change in perspective has the potential to substantially alter how public care systems operate. The practical challenges are significant, both in the interpretation of wellbeing goals and in determining how the care system might be configured to achieve them.
The main aim of this paper is to contrast a needs-led resource allocation system with one using a maximising wellbeing approach; that is, one based on: measuring the wellbeing consequences of using services and applying the principles of cost-effectiveness and opportunity cost. As a precursor, the paper also describes how a maximising wellbeing approach might be applied in the case of long-term care.
We argue that in theory a maximising wellbeing approach with full information will produce greater total wellbeing improvement for the same budget than a needs-based system. In practice, the comparison will depend on: (a) whether we can actually measure wellbeing in a way that is consistent with the policy goals; (b) the availability of cost-effectiveness information; and (c) the decision rules used to implement a maximising wellbeing approach
Report on the evaluation of the costs and benefits of the 'Stronger Together in Warrington' programme
On nonstandard chemotactic dynamics with logistic growth induced by a modified complex Ginzburg–Landau equation
The author is partially supported by MINECO-Feder (Spain), research grant number RTI2018-
098850-B-I00, as well as by Junta de Andalucía (Spain), Project PY18-RT-2422, and A-FQM-311-
UGR18.In this paper, we derive a variant of the classical Keller-Segel model of chemotaxis incorporating a growth term of logistic type for the cell population n(t,x), say nu n(1-n) with nu>0, and a nonstandard chemical production-degradation mechanism involving first- and second-order derivatives of the logarithm of the cell density, say f lambda ab(n,nx,nxx)=lambda n+anxxn+bnx2n2 with lambda,a,b is an element of R, via the (n,S)-hydrodynamical system associated with a modified Ginzburg-Landau equation governing the evolution of the complex wavefunction psi=neiS. In a chemotactic context, S(t,x) will play the role of the concentration of chemical substance. Then, after carrying out a detailed analysis of the modulational stability of uniform-in-space plane waves, dark soliton-shaped traveling wave densities of the former system are constructed from solitary wave solutions of the latter.Junta de Andalucia European Commission PY18-RT-2422 and AFQM-311-UGR18MINECO-Feder (Spain
Some considerations relating to the attribution of NHS activity to outcomes for people with long-term conditions
An advanced symbolic analyzer for the automatic generation of analog circuit design equations
A tool for symbolic analysis of analog integrated circuits is presented featuring accurate simplification, pole/zero extraction, and tools for parametric AC circuit characterization. The program, called ASAP, uses signal flowgraph methods and has been written in C for portability. In its current version, ASAP is able to deal with the complexity levels arising in typical analog building blocks when described by device-level models. The ASAP inputs and outputs, the architecture, and the graphical interface are discussed
Diavideos: a Diabetes Health Video Portal
Diavideos1 is a web platform that collects trustworthy
diabetes health videos from YouTube and offers them in a easy
way. YouTube is a big repository of health videos, but good
content is sometimes mixed with misleading and harmful
videos such as promoting anorexia [1].Diavideos is a web
portal that provides easy access to a repository of trustworthy
diabetes videos. This poster describes Diavideos and explains
the crawling method used to retrieve these videos from trusted
channels
Open Source Virtual Worlds and Low Cost Sensors for Physical Rehab of Patients with Chronic Diseases
For patients with chronic diseases, exercise is a key part of rehab to
deal better with their illness. Some of them do rehabilitation at home with telemedicine
systems. However, keeping to their exercising program is challenging
and many abandon the rehabilitation. We postulate that information technologies
for socializing and serious games can encourage patients to keep doing
physical exercise and rehab. In this paper we present Virtual Valley, a low cost
telemedicine system for home exercising, based on open source virtual worlds
and utilizing popular low cost motion controllers (e.g. Wii Remote) and medical
sensors. Virtual Valley allows patient to socialize, learn, and play group based
serious games while exercising
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