The Slovakian Long-term Care System. ENEPRI Research Report No. 86, 15 June 2010

Launched in January 2009, ANCIEN is a research project that runs for a 44-month period and involves 20 partners from EU member states. The project principally concerns the future of long-term care (LTC) for the elderly in Europe and addresses two questions in particular: 1) How will need, demand, supply and use of LTC develop? 2) How do different systems of LTC perform? This case study on Slovakia is part of the first stage in the project aimed at collecting the basic data and necessary information to portray long-term care in each country of the EU. It will be followed by analysis and projections of future scenarios on long-term care needs, use, quality assurance and system performance. State-of-the-art demographic, epidemiologic and econometric modelling will be used to interpret and project needs, supply and use of long-term care over future time periods for different LTC systems

Impact of Ageing Populations on Silver Economy, Health and Long-Term Care Workforce

The socio-ecological transition will led to an overall change in the supply and demand of goods and services and therefore to a change in consumption as well as production structure at national level, but also to changes in the single sectors. It is expected that in particular three sectors will show a high dynamic caused by the demographic change: the health sector, the long-term care sector as well as change in demand and supply for goods and services for the elderly. This policy brief summarize the findings of Work package 12 of NEUJOBS project: \u201cHealth care, goods and services for an ageing population\u201d. Main attention is related to current employment situation within these sectors and exploration of possible changes in employment structure across European countries in following 15 years.This publication was produced as part of the NEUJOBS project, funded by the European Commission through the 7th Framework Programme under contract no. 266833 (http://www.neujobs)

The space between worlds: Liminality, multidimensional Virtual Reality and Deep Immersion

Normal, everyday consciousness is a mixture of mental states which change, dependent upon both internal and external factors, ordinarily without any particular focused direction. When deliberate change is desired, however, there are mechanisms of transition available. These gateways allow smooth induction between stable, sustained, brain states. Building upon the concept of Deep Immersion, multidimensional virtual reality is explored utilizing personal narrative, portals and symbolic anchoring links as mechanisms of transit. Together, these target specific states within the individual, using biofeedback and fluid, self-adapting environments. This work is informed by Buddhist, yogic and other spiritual traditions, employing the latest technologies in Virtual and Augmented Reality, combined with mobile sensors and EEG equipment

Event Perception

Events are central elements of human experience. Formally, they can be individuated in terms of the entities that compose them, the features of those entities, and the relations amongst entities. Psychologically, representations of events capture their spatiotemporal location, the people and objects involved, and the relations between these elements. Here, we present an account of the nature of psychological representations of events and how they are constructed and updated. Event representations are like images in that they are isomorphic to the situations they represent. However, they are like models or language in that they are constructed of components rather than being holistic. Also, they are partial representations that leave out some elements and abstract others. Representations of individual events are informed by schematic knowledge about general classes of events. Event representations are constructed in a process that segments continuous activity into discrete events. The construction of a series of event representations forms a basis for predicting the future, planning for that future, and imagining alternatives

Impact of Ageing on Curative Health Care Workforce in Selected EU Countries

Population ageing combined with a shrinking potential workforce are main factors influencing future socio-economic development and the labour market. This paper has the objective to show the impact of population change on one important sector of the economy, the health care market. As the need for health care services increases with age, the population ageing is expected to have a direct influence on the demand for services and the workforce needed. The shrinking labour force and the currently high share of elderly health professionals will have an impact of the future supply of health workforce. Based on the NEUJOBS demographic scenarios tough and friendly and age- and gender specific utilization rates the changes in the health workforce needed are calculated. Changes in labour supply and employment are shown using the results of the econometric model NEMESIS. In both scenario a decline in population size and an ageing of the population is expected. In the friendly scenario the demand for health care services is expected to increase, although the population size declines. The population ageing has a higher effect on the demand as the shrinking population size. In the tough scenario the significant decline in population dominates the demand for health workforce. Due to the demographic change also a decline in labour supply is calculated, while the employment in health care is estimated to increase in both scenarios. In 2025, the estimated employment is higher than the demand for health workforce. But on the demand side the calculations show only the pure demographic effect. Due to data restrictions we could not take into account the technological medical progress, changes in health utilization behaviour or changes in health status of the population. All these factor have an influence on the future health workforce demand.This publication was produced as part of the NEUJOBS project, funded by the European Commission through the 7th Framework Programme under contract no. 266833 (http://www.neujobs)

First language attrition and reversion among older migrants

Emigration usually requires speakers to become bilingual, and eventually they may even become dominant in their second language. This can lead to a gradual loss of proficiency in the first language, a phenomenon referred to as first language attrition. As migrants become elderly, however, they sometimes report a "reversion" in language dominance, whereby the second language, which they have used in their daily lives for years or decades, recedes and the first language becomes stronger again. There are largely anecdotal cases of communication between such speakers and their children who were not brought up to speak their parents' first language becoming impossible. It is, however, very difficult to separate fact from fiction in such reports. This article will give an overview of changes in lexical access and fluency in the first language of adult migrants. It will assess simplistic predictions for a linear development of first and second languages against a more complex perspective which takes into account psycholinguistic aspects of activation, inhibition, and cognitive ageing. The predictions made on this basis will be tested on a large-scale quantitative investigation of language proficiency among migrants of German and Dutch descent in the Netherlands and Canada. © 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG

The role of spatial boundaries in shaping long-term event representations

When remembering the past, we typically recall ‘events’ that are bounded in time and space. However, as we navigate our environment our senses receive a continuous stream of information. How do we create discrete long-term episodic memories from continuous input? Although previous research has provided evidence for a role of spatial boundaries in the online segmentation of our sensory experience within working memory, it is not known how this segmentation contributes to subsequent long-term episodic memory. Here we show that the presence of a spatial boundary at encoding (a doorway between two rooms) impairs participants’ later ability to remember the order that objects were presented in. A sequence of two objects presented in the same room in a virtual reality environment is more accurately remembered than a sequence of two objects presented in adjoining rooms. The results are captured by a simple model in which items are associated to a context representation that changes gradually over time, and changes more rapidly when crossing a spatial boundary. We therefore provide the first evidence that the structure of long-term episodic memory is shaped by the presence of a spatial boundary and provide constraints on the nature of the interaction between working memory and long-term memory