Care Management Journals : Journal of Case Management ; the Journal of Long Term Home Health Care

This article proposes that social role theory (SRT) and social role valorization (SRV) be established as organizing theories for care managers. SRT is a recognized sociological theory that has a distinctive place in care management practice. SRV is an adjunct for SRT that focuses on people who are devalued by being in a negative social position and supports behavior change and movement to a valued social position.

We explored the state of knowledge on home care supplies and equipment because not much is known about this topic. We used a scoping review for the literature review because it was the most appropriate approach considering the state of the literature. We searched for articles published in both the gray and peer-reviewed literature. We established five overarching themes based on the findings. These were supply management, durable medical equipment, wound care, best practices, and costs. This review demonstrates that although knowledge about home care supplies and equipment is growing, it is still an understudied area...

The growing population of homebound adults increasingly receives home-based primary care (HBPC) services. These patients are predominantly frail older adults who are homebound because of multiple medical comorbidities, yet they often also have psychiatric diagnoses requiring mental health care. Unfortunately, in-home psychiatric services are rarely available to homebound patients. To address unmet psychiatric need among the homebound patients enrolled in our large academic HBPC program, we piloted a psychiatric in-home consultation service...

Hospitals are under increasing pressures by governing bodies to meet mandated performance standards and fiscal targets. As a result, hospitals are incentivized by funders to discharge patients efficiently and effectively. Gaining insight into the patient experience of discharge, as well as understanding patient needs and concerns, is prudent. Leveraging this knowledge may expedite patient discharge and potentially minimize hospital readmission rates. The purpose of this study was to better understand the discharge experiences and concerns of patients with multiple chronic diseases-a population currently understudied...

This article categorizes and delineates approaches to information sharing and assessment in a demonstration program established by central government in England. Its purpose was to develop and test a set of principles relating to a general assessment framework for adults in demonstrator sites, maximizing the use of information technology where feasible. The method employed comprised the systematic analysis of documents associated with the funding application and a telephone interview with personnel in each site...

Using a mixed methods approach, the provision of support exchanges between family members across national borders was examined. Specifically, this project examined transnational support among Asian Indian elderly residing in India whose children resided outside India. Seventy adults participated in this project in the cities of Bangalore and Mumbai. Individuals participated in either a focus group meeting or completed a survey to examine their transnational family support experiences. Most seniors were educated, of middle-income category or higher, socially active, enjoyed good health, and were not keen to live in multigeneration households...

Good interprofessional work (IPW) is essential to provide quality home-based end-of-life (EOL) care. The purpose of this study was to explore the factors of "good collaboration," as evaluated separately by home care nurses (HNs), home helpers (HHs), and care managers (CMs). The relationship was examined between their evaluation of good collaboration and their recent actual experience of interprofessional collaborative work for a home-based EOL case. The questionnaire was returned nationwide by 378 HNs, 305 HHs, and 476 CMs, and data were collected on 177 EOL cases from HNs, 84 cases from HHs, and 123 cases from CMs...

Recent studies suggest dementia is an emerging health issue for Indigenous peoples in Canada. In this article, we explore findings concerning informal dementia caregiving in Indigenous communities. Our research has been carried out in partnership with Indigenous communities in Ontario, Canada, over the past 4 years. Semistructured in-depth interviews were carried out with informal Indigenous caregivers (primarily family) to Indigenous people with dementia at 7 geographically and culturally diverse research sites (n = 34)...

Neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, induce caregivers already struggling to cope with the behavioral aberrations of dementia to constantly update their cultural construction of the disease because the outward symptoms used to interpret it are in constant flux. For ethnic minority caregivers, particularly, coping is a process of tracking a moving set of symptoms, making cultural sense of them across time, and negotiating a medical environment that can be hostile to them because of their "nonstandard" cultural health beliefs...

In quite a short amount of time, Sweden has gone from being a relatively homogeneous society to a multicultural one, with a rapid expansion of immigrants having culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds growing old in Sweden. This is particularly interesting in relation to studying age-related dementia diseases. Research shows that not only do CALD persons with dementia diseases tend to mix languages, have difficulties with separation of languages, or revert to speaking only their native tongue as the disease progresses, but they also show tendencies to experience that they live in the cultural environment in which they were brought up, rather than in the current Swedish one...

This study focuses on expressions of identity and self among residents at a group home for older persons with dementia in Japan--a study, which started as an explorative study on spirituality--and how residents make meaning of life. Although aware of stages of dementia illness and briefly commenting on these, the analysis does not make any specific point of it. This article views dementia from a sociocultural perspective and is based on participant observations at a group home with 19 residents, combined with interviews with 6 of them...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The Person-Centered Hospital Discharge Program (PCHDP) was offered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as a way to improve care to Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries in Maryland. The PCHDP used a care nurse/coordinator to facilitate the successful transition of patients at risk for becoming eligible for Medicaid. The purpose of this study was to examine the outcomes of the PCHDP pilot, explore factors that influenced hospital and long-term care admissions following hospital discharge, and obtain operational data to develop new programs with related objectives...

BACKGROUND: The aim of our study is to quantify the occurrence of suspension of scheduled surgeries in a Brazilian university hospital, trying to identify the causes of suspension of these operations and meet the medical specialties that most contributed to the cancellation. METHODS: This study takes the form of an exploratory, descriptive, and quantitative enquiry carried out by analyzing the database from 2008 to 2011 of the operating theater. RESULTS: Of the 29,518 scheduled surgeries, 16...

This article offers an analysis of the impact of recovery-oriented treatment discourses and practices on tenant-staff relationships in the context of the Pinewood Apartments, a Texas-based permanent supported housing community. Drawing on 6 months of ethnographic research and personal experience of working as a caregiver at Pinewood, I demonstrate how tenant-staff relationships were compromised by service providers' negative evaluations of certain tenants in the context of emotionally charged service interactions...

Case management (CM) establishes valuable connections between clients and needed supports. There are, however, mixed results on its prediction of health care use. This quasi-experimental record review (N = 96) of a collaborative CM consortium examined predictors of health care use among older adults (aged older than 60 years) who had received CM for at least 6 months. Descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate models were used to predict differences in outcomes (hospitalization and emergency room [ER] visits) between participants who received CM and those who did not...

This article provides a commentary on the costs of obese nursing home patients. We conducted a comprehensive literature search, which found 46 relevant articles on obesity in older adults and effects on nursing home facilities. This review indicated obesity is increasing globally for all age groups and older adults are facing increased challenges with chronic diseases associated with obesity more than ever before. With medical advances comes greater life expectancy, but obese adults often experience more disabilities, which require nursing home care...

Fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption can improve older adults' health outcomes, but conventional interventions can be resource demanding and make it difficult to provide just-in-time intervention content. iPad-based interventions may help overcome these limitations, but little is known about how older adults might perceive and use iPads for FV consumption. To address this gap in the literature, we conducted a qualitative study to explore older adults' perceptions and use of iPads for improving FV consumption between February and August of 2012...

American Indians are classified by the federal government as a "health disparities population" with significant excess morbidity and mortality caused by diabetes and its many complications. The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health has created a national program titled "Centers of Excellence" whose primary goal is the elimination of health disparities. This article describes the American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, College of Public Health, in terms of its intellectual foundations rooted in a biocultural analytic model and operationalized by an interdisciplinary functioning staff...

Diabetes contributes to sensory peripheral neuropathy, which has been linked to lower limb abnormalities that raise the risk for foot ulcers and amputations. Because amputations are a reason for pain and hospitalization in those with diabetes, it is of critical importance to gain insight about prevention of ulcer development in this population. Although the American Diabetes Association (ADA) now recommends that individuals with neuropathy can engage in moderate-intensity weight-bearing activity (WBA), they must wear appropriate footwear and inspect their feet daily...