28,760 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
Quid Pro Quo: A Mechanism for Fair Collaboration in Networked Systems
Collaboration may be understood as the execution of coordinated tasks (in the
most general sense) by groups of users, who cooperate for achieving a common
goal. Collaboration is a fundamental assumption and requirement for the correct
operation of many communication systems. The main challenge when creating
collaborative systems in a decentralized manner is dealing with the fact that
users may behave in selfish ways, trying to obtain the benefits of the tasks
but without participating in their execution. In this context, Game Theory has
been instrumental to model collaborative systems and the task allocation
problem, and to design mechanisms for optimal allocation of tasks. In this
paper, we revise the classical assumptions and propose a new approach to this
problem. First, we establish a system model based on heterogenous nodes (users,
players), and propose a basic distributed mechanism so that, when a new task
appears, it is assigned to the most suitable node. The classical technique for
compensating a node that executes a task is the use of payments (which in most
networks are hard or impossible to implement). Instead, we propose a
distributed mechanism for the optimal allocation of tasks without payments. We
prove this mechanism to be robust event in the presence of independent selfish
or rationally limited players. Additionally, our model is based on very weak
assumptions, which makes the proposed mechanisms susceptible to be implemented
in networked systems (e.g., the Internet).Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures, 3 algorithm
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
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
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