POLICY POINTS At age 65, the average man and woman can respectively expect 1.5 years and 2.5 years of requiring daily help with "activities of daily living." Available services fail to match frail elders' needs, thereby routinely generating errors, unreliability, unwanted services, unmet needs, and high costs. The number of elderly Medicare beneficiaries likely to be frail will triple between 2...

Despite the availability of health and social care services designed to support people in their own homes, older people often underuse or refuse these services. It is now acknowledged that this phenomenon contributes to older people being admitted to hospital and long-term care in circumstances that could be avoided. To understand how the uptake of supportive and preventative services can be im...

Planning for the care of increasing numbers of elderly persons with dementia has become an urgent health services concern in Canada and elsewhere, yet little is known about the challenges of providing appropriate dementia care in rural areas. A community-based approach was used to obtain input from decision-makers and others to develop the objectives and design for a study of rural dementia car...

Family planning programmes initiated in the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1966 met with limited success. Following the 1986 census family planning was considered a priority and was supported by the country's leaders. Appropriate strategies based on the principles of health promotion led to an increase in the contraceptive prevalence rate among married women from 49.0% in 1989 to 73.8% in 2006. ...

Background Individuals struggling with a substance use disorder often have a variety of co-occurring service needs that go unmet due to the difficulty in coordinating these services. As the substance use treatment system moves toward treating addiction as a chronic disease, it will be necessary to develop models for the coordination of general medical and addiction treatment services, coupled w...

The proposal that mental health workers should explicitly train to become ‘recovery-oriented practitioners’ has been gathering pace for over a decade (O’Hagan 2001; National Institute for Mental Health in England 2004a). It is now supported by professional endorsements (Care Services Improvement Partnership 2007), national policy (Department of Health 2011), advocacy from non-statutory organisa...

Addressing substance abuse in families is an important concern for the social work field. This article presents a preliminary view of a continuing care substance abuse recovery services program designed to assist the substance-affected family. The intervention approach is a blended model of substance abuse recovery work and family preservation. Services are directed at helping substance-abusing...

Personalized Education (PE) addresses the opportunities and necessities of integrating a diverse range of technologies to support individualized learning. This paper introduces a multi-agents architecture, based on the Smart Platform [1] and the detailed agent design for a PE System (PES). Specifically, to deliver personalized education services, PES consists of seven personalized education age...

BACKGROUND Routine immunization (RI) is a key child survival intervention. Ensuring acceptable standards of RI service delivery is critical for optimal outcomes. Accumulated evidences suggest that 'supportive supervision' improves the quality of health care services in general. During 2009-2010, the Government of Odisha and UNICEF jointly piloted this strategy in four districts to improve RI pr...