A Service Model For Delivering Care Closer to Home.

Upton Surgery (Worcestershire) has developed a flexible and responsive service model that facilitates multi-agency support for adult patients with complex care needs experiencing an acute health crisis. The purpose of this service is to provide appropriate interventions that avoid unnecessary hospital admissions or, alternatively, provide support to facilitate early discharge from secondary care. Key aspects of this service are the collaborative and proactive identification of patients at risk, rapid creation and deployment of a reactive multi-agency team and follow-up of patients with an appropriate long-term care plan. A small team of dedicated staff (the Complex Care Team) are pivotal to coordinating and delivering this service. Key skills are sophisticated leadership and project management skills, and these have been used sensitively to challenge some traditional roles and boundaries in the interests of providing effective, holistic care for the patient. This is a practical example of early implementation of the principles underlying the Department of Health’s (DH) recent Best Practice Guidance, ‘Delivering Care Closer to Home’ (DH, July 2008) and may provide useful learning points for other general practice surgeries considering implementing similar models. This integrated case management approach has had enthusiastic endorsement from patients and carers. In addition to the enhanced quality of care and experience for the patient, this approach has delivered value for money. Secondary care costs have been reduced by preventing admissions and also by reducing excess bed-days. The savings achieved have justified the ongoing commitment to the service and the staff employed in the Complex Care Team. The success of this service model has been endorsed recently by the ‘Customer Care’ award by ‘Management in Practice’. The Surgery was also awarded the ‘Practice of the Year’ award for this and a number of other customer-focussed projects.

The Use of Touch Screen Technology by People with Dementia and Their Carers in Care Home Settings.

Dominic Upton, Jennifer Bray, Tim Jones and Penney Upton report on research that confirms that touchscreen devices can be of great benefit in engaging and supporting people with dementia.

Impacto do fator emocional quando da recuperação de informação da home page do Departamento de Doenças Sexualmente Transmissíveis, AIDS e Hepatites Virais da Secretaria de Vigilância em Saúde do Ministério da Saúde/

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Ciência da Informação, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Informação, 2016.

Handling the transfer of power: a note on the 1964 origins of the Douglas‐Home rules

Opposition is rarely a good preparation for government. The only post‐war government to enter office confident, well‐acquainted with the Civil Service and with a fund of administrative experience to draw on was the Attlee administration formed in 1945. The longer a party spends in opposition the more these assets disappear. Labour, by the end of the long period of Conservative rule in 1951–64, was largely unfamiliar with the burdens of office. This formed the background to the formulation of the Douglas‐Home rules, whereby informal contact is permitted between the Civil Service and the Opposition in advance of a general election. Since 1964 this arrangement has gradually become more extensive (especially after Neil Kinnock complained that the period for contact was too brief during the run‐up to the 1992 election) and more formalised. In late 1993 John Major agreed that contacts could be made from early 1996 in advance of the next election, rather than only during the last six months of a parliament, as had by then become the convention.’ The object of this short paper is, however, to explain how these rules originated.

Home bias persistence in foreign direct investments

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the issues related to home bias and foreign direct investments (FDIs). We study the role of physical, cultural, and institutional distances from home on FDI decisions taken by corporations to assess whether the globalization of the past two decades has reduced their influence. Using the ‘home bias’ framework from the finance literature and the gravity model from the economics literature, we utilize a large sample of both developed and emerging markets, using FDI flows of 6263 unique bilateral country pairs over a 30-year period. We find strong empirical evidence of persistent home bias in FDI outflows, and we show that not only physical distance but also cultural and institutional similarities between host and source countries remain a decisive factor in foreign corporate investment decisions. We also show that such home bias is persistent over time and is observed around the world.

Energy efficiency analysis considering the use of an intelligent systems management in a smart home

In this abstract is presented an energy management system included in a SCADA system existent in a intelligent home. The system control the home energy resources according to the players definitions (electricity consumption and comfort levels), the electricity prices variation in real time mode and the DR events proposed by the aggregators.