Preferences for place of care and place of death among informal caregivers of the terminally ill

Objectives: (1) To determine informal caregivers perceptions about place of care and place of death; and (2) to identify variables associated with a home death among terminally ill individuals who received in-home support services in a publicly funded home care system. Participants and design: A total of 216 informal caregivers participated in a bereavement interview. Data collection included care recipient and informal caregiver characteristics, the use of and satisfaction with community services, and preferences about place of death. Results: Most caregivers reported that they and the care recipient had a preferred place of death (77 and 68%, respectively) with over 63% reporting home as the preferred place of death. Caregivers had a greater preference for an institutional death (14%) than care recipients (4.7%). While 30% of care recipients did not die in their preferred location, most caregivers (92%) felt, in retrospect, that where the care recipient died was the appropriate place of death. Most caregivers reported being satisfied with the care that was provided. The odds of dying at home were greater when the care recipient stated a preference for place of death (OR: 2.92; 95% CI: 1.25, 6.85), and the family physician made home visits during the care recipients last month of life (Univariate odds ratios (OR): 4.42; 95% CI: 1.46, 13.36). Discussion: The ethic of self-control and choice for the care recipient must be balanced with consideration for the well being of the informal caregiver and responsiveness of the community service system. © 2005 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd.

A shared care model pilot for palliative home care in a rural area:Impact on symptoms, distress, and place of death

Context: Shared care models integrating family physician services with interdisciplinary palliative care specialist teams are critical to improve access to quality palliative home care and address multiple domains of end-of-life issues and needs. Objectives: To examine the impact of a shared care pilot program on the primary outcomes of symptom severity and emotional distress (patient and family separately) over time and, secondarily, the concordance between patient preferences and place of death. Methods: An inception cohort of patients (n = 95) with advanced, progressive disease, expected to die within six months, were recruited from three rural family physician group practices (21 physicians) and followed prospectively until death or pilot end. Serial measurement of symptoms, emotional distress (patient and family), and preferences for place of death was performed, with analysis of changes in distress outcomes assessed using t-tests and general linear models. Results: Symptoms trended toward improvement, with a significant reduction in anxiety from baseline to 14 days noted. Symptom and emotional distress were maintained below high severity (7-10), and a high rate of home death compared with population norms was observed. Conclusion: Future controlled studies are needed to examine outcomes for shared care models with comparison groups. Shared care models build on family physician capacity and as such are promising in the development of palliative home care programs to improve access to quality palliative home care and foster health system integration. © 2011 U.S. Cancer Pain Relief Committee. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Digital Exposure of English Place-names (DEEP)

Place-names are a fundamental concept in all academic collections: everything happens somewhere. Contemporary place-names are comprehensively represented in digital gazetteer and geospatial web services such as GeoNames. However, despite millions of pounds of investment by JISC and other agencies in historical online resources in recent years, there is currently no equivalent for historic place-names. This project will digitize the entire 86 volume corpus of the Survey of English Place-Names (SEPN), the ultimate authority on historic place-names in England, and make its 4 million forms available.

JISC Workshop Report: E-Research Resources, Tools and Methods for Historic Place Name Analysis

A substantial amount of the 'critical mass' of digital data available to scholarship contains place-names, and it is now recognised that spatial and temporal data points, including place-names, are a vital part of the e-research infrastructure that supports the use, re-use and advanced analysis of data using ICT tools and methods. Place-names can also be linked semantically to contribute to the web of data, and to enrich content through linking existing data, and identifying new collections for digitization to strategically enhance existing digital collections. However, existing e-projects rely on modern gazetteers limiting them to the modern and the near-contemporary. This workshop explored how to further integrate the wealth of historical place-name scholarship, and the resulting digital resources generated within UK academia, so enabling integration of local knowledge over much longer periods.

‘5 ways to say your prayers’:The Art and Architecture of Curating People, Place and Creativity in a Post-Conflict Context. The Shed, Galway, Ireland 18th June – 23rd July 2013 Includes: 1. Co-Curation of Exhibition with Peter Mutschler, Director of PS² and 2. Morrow’s individual work as part of the exhibition, entitled ‘Departures & Arrivals: Academic Interactions with the Activities, Artists and Archive of PS² ’

This exhibition profiles the curatorial approach of PS² and the work of creative practitioners who have practiced alongside and with the organisation. PS² is a Belfast-based, voluntary arts organisation that initiates projects inside and outside its project space. It seeks to develop a socio-spatial practice that responds to the post-conflict context of Northern Ireland, with particular focus on active intervention and social interaction between local people, creative practitioners, multidisciplinary groups and theorists.
Morrow has collaborated with PS² since its inception in 2005, acting as curatorial advisor specifically on the projects that occur outside PS² . She regards her involvement as a parallel action to her pedagogical explorations within architectural education.

Morrow's personal contribution to the Exhibition aimed to:
-interrogate PS² spatial projects
-contextualise PS² curatorial practice
-open up the analytical framework and extend to similar local practices

The Shed, Galway, Ireland is a joint Galway City Arts and Harbour Company venture. The exhibition subsequently travelled to DarcSpace Gallery, Dublin (Sept 2013).

An Ethical Production of Place:A Case for Economy in Architectural Design

Architects typically interpret Heidegger to mean that dwelling in the Black Forest, was more authentic than living in an industrialised society however we cannot turn back the clock so we are confronted with the reality of modernisation. Since the Second World War production has shifted from material to immaterial assets. Increasingly place is believed to offer resistance to this fluidity, but this belief can conversely be viewed as expressing a sublimated anxiety about our role in the world – the need to create buildings that are self-consciously contextual suggests that we may no longer be rooted in material places, but in immaterial relations.
This issue has been pondered by David Harvey in his paper From Place to Space and Back Again where he argues that the role of place in legitimising identity is ultimately a political process, as the interpretation of its meaning is dependent on whose interpretation it is. Doreen Massey has found that different classes of people are more or less mobile and that mobility is related to class and education rather than to nationality or geography. These thinkers point to a different set of questions than the usual space/place divide – how can we begin to address the economic mediation of spatial production to develop an ethical production of place? Part of the answer is provided by the French architectural practice Lacaton Vassal in their book Plus. They ask themselves how to produce more space for the same cost so that people can enjoy a better quality of life. Another French practitioner, Patrick Bouchain, has argued that architect’s fees should be inversely proportional to the amount of material resources that they consume. These approaches use economics as a starting point for generating architectural form and point to more ethical possibilities for architectural practice

Exchange Place

Novel