Service users' views of therapeutic care

The overall aim of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Therapeutic Care service delivered by the Red Cross. Specific objectives were to explore service users’ experiences and perceptions of Therapeutic Care. The research adopted a qualitative approach with purposive sampling used to identify and recruit individuals from Central Scotland who had received the service in the last 12 months. In-depth unstructured interviews were conducted with 30 service users aged between 39 -100 years, who suffered from a range of health conditions including cancer, Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, chronic pain and mental ill health

User involvement and desired service developments in drug treatment: Service user and provider views

Aims - To investigate the existing level of user involvement at selected agencies, to examine views about user involvement from both service-user and provider perspectives and to compare desired service developments. Design/Measurements - As part of a larger project, a series of semi-structured interviews was carried out between 2001 and 2003. Setting - Community-based drug services in Northern England. Participants - Service users (46) and service providers (51). Findings - Overall, the level of service-user involvement was low, with 16% of services having no user involvement at all. Nevertheless, service users expressed a desire for a high level of user involvement, compared with the low aspirations expressed by service providers. Service users' first priority for desired service developments was reduced waiting times, whereas service providers wished for increased provision of complementary therapies. Conclusions - The study highlighted important discrepancies regarding both desired level of user involvement and priorities for service developments between service users und providers. Given the current policies in this field and evidence that user involvement and closer partnerships between users and providers enhances treatment effectiveness, this lack of concurrence might be of major concern and working towards better understanding and balancing users' and providers' needs is highly recommended

A Hierarchical Game with Strategy Evolution for Mobile Sponsored Content and Service Markets

In sponsored content and service markets, the content and service providers are able to subsidize their target mobile users through directly paying the mobile network operator, to lower the price of the data/service access charged by the network operator to the mobile users. The sponsoring mechanism leads to a surge in mobile data and service demand, which in return compensates for the sponsoring cost and benefits the content/service providers. In this paper, we study the interactions among the three parties in the market, namely, the mobile users, the content/service providers and the network operator, as a two-level game with multiple Stackelberg (i.e., leader) players. Our study is featured by the consideration of global network effects owning to consumers' grouping. Since the mobile users may have bounded rationality, we model the service-selection process among them as an evolutionary-population follower sub-game. Meanwhile, we model the pricing-then-sponsoring process between the content/service providers and the network operator as a non-cooperative equilibrium searching problem. By investigating the structure of the proposed game, we reveal a few important properties regarding the equilibrium existence, and propose a distributed, projection-based algorithm for iterative equilibrium searching. Simulation results validate the convergence of the proposed algorithm, and demonstrate how sponsoring helps improve both the providers' profits and the users' experience

Cross-Domain Discovery of Communication Peers. Identity Mapping and Discovery Services (IMaDS)

The upcoming WebRTC-based browser-to-browser communication services present new challenges for user discovery in peer-to-peer mode. Even more so, if we wish to enable different web communication services to interact. This paper presents Identity Mapping and Discovery Service (IMaDS), a global, scalable, service independent discovery service that enables users of web-based peer-to-peer applications to discover other users whom to communicate with. It also provides reachability and presence information. For that, user identities need to be mapped to any compatible service identity as well as to a globally unique, service-independent identity. This mapping and discovery process is suitable for multiple identifier formats and personal identifying properties, but it supports user-determined privacy options. IMaDS operates across different service domains dynamically, using context information. Users and devices have profiles containing context and other specific information that can be discovered by a search engine. The search results reveal the user's allocated globally unique identifier (GUID), which is then resolved to a list of the user's service domains identities, using a DHT-based directory service. Service-specific directories allow tracking of active endpoints, where users are currently logged on and can be contacted.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2017 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC

Service-users’ experiences of an early intervention in psychosis service: an interpretative phenomenological analysis

OBJECTIVES: Previous research regarding Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP) services has mainly adopted quantitative methodologies, in order to study the effectiveness of EIP services. Research studies that have explored service-users' experiences of EIP services are small in number. This research aimed to explore service-users' experiences of being in contact with an EIP service, its impact of their experience of psychosis and current life situation. DESIGN: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to conduct an in-depth qualitative study of a small sample of EIP service-users, in order to explore their experiences of being in contact with the service. METHOD: Flexibly guided interviews were conducted with eight service-users who had been receiving a service from an EIP team for more than 2 years and were recruited using a purposive sampling method. Verbatim interview transcripts were analysed using IPA. RESULTS: Five super-ordinate themes, developed from the analysis, are discussed in sections: Stigma, Relationships, Understanding the experiences, Sense of agency, and Impact on sense of self. Sub-themes of these super-ordinate themes are also discussed. CONCLUSIONS: The themes developed from the analysis were envisioned as representing an overarching theme of 'A personal journey of recovery', which was influenced by participants' involvement with the EIP service. Clinical implications include the need for EIP services, as with other mental health services, to find ways to promote recovery and create opportunities for agency and control. Future research directions are also discussed

Service users' experiences of a brief intervention service for children and adolescents : a service evaluation

Ten per cent of young people experience mental health difficulties at any one time. Prevention and early intervention leads to better prognosis for young people's mental well-being in the short and long term. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) must be able to provide swift and effective interventions for a range of difficulties to meet this need. This paper presents a service evaluation of the Brief Intervention Service in North Lincolnshire CAMHS. Nine young people and/or their families took part in semi-structured interviews that aimed to explore their experiences of receiving an intervention from the service. Template analysis was carried out to draw out themes from the interview transcripts. The three a priori themes were treatment outcomes, areas for potential improvement, and things that are working well; and an additional two emergent themes were emotional experience and managing practical barriers. In addition, all participants were asked about their satisfaction with the service and whether they would recommend the service to others. One hundred per cent reported feeling respected by their clinician when asked directly, and all felt that the service would be helpful for other young people and families. Overall, families were satisfied with the service and reported outcomes including improvements in symptomatology and family functioning. Specific recommendations as to how the service could be improved were made, which related to difficulties accessing the service, the content of the sessions, and communication within the service and with other services

Stochastic Optimization of Service Provision with Selfish Users

We develop a computationally efficient technique to solve a fairly general distributed service provision problem with selfish users and imperfect information. In particular, in a context in which the service capacity of the existing infrastructure can be partially adapted to the user load by activating just some of the service units, we aim at finding the configuration of active service units that achieves the best trade-off between maintenance (e.g.\ energetic) costs for the provider and user satisfaction. The core of our technique resides in the implementation of a belief-propagation (BP) algorithm to evaluate the cost configurations. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: paper presented at NETSTAT Workshop, Budapest - June 201

Supporting Dynamic Service Composition at Runtime based on End-user Requirements

Network-based software application services are receiving a lot of attention in recent years, as observed in developments as Internet of Services, Software as a Service and Cloud Computing. A service-oriented computing ecosystem is being created where the end-user is having an increasingly more active role in the service creation process. However, supporting end-users in the creation process, at runtime, is a difficult undertaking. Users have different requirements and preferences towards application services, use services in different situations and expect highly abstract mechanisms in the creation process. Furthermore, there are different types of end-users: some can deliver more detailed requirements or can be provided with more advanced request interface, while others can not. To tackle these issues and provide end-users with personalised service delivery, we claim that runtime automated service composition mechanisms are required. In this paper we present the DynamiCoS framework, which aims at supporting the different phases required to provide end-users with automatic service discovery, selection and composition process. In this paper we also present the developed prototype and its evaluation