Is the absence of spiritual well-being at the facit-sp equivalent to spiritual distress in older patients?

Objective: Although initially developed to assess spiritual well-being,the FACIT-Sp is increasingly used to assess the other end of the spectrum,i.e. spiritual distress. This study intends to investigate whether theFACIT-Sp could really contribute to this aim in older patients. Method:Patients (N=135, 81.47.1 years, 68.3% women) aged 65 years and over,with MMSE score>19, admitted consecutively in post-acute rehabilitationwere enrolled. The FACIT-Sp (12 items, score 0 to 48, high spiritualwell-being defined as score_36) was administered and commentswere systematically retrieved. Results: Overall, 32(23.7%) patients hadhigh spiritual well-being. FACIT-Sp internal consistency was good(Cronbach's 0.85) and a confirmatory factorial analysis was consistentwith Meaning and Faith proposed subscales. Qualitative analysisshowed that negative answers (score=0) to "My illness has strengthenedmy faith or spiritual beliefs" (N=76/135) could equally reflect theabsence of impact (49/76, 64.5%) or a negative impact (religious struggle,27/76, 35.5%) of illness on faith. However, former patients had significantlyhigher FACIT-Sp scores than the latter (30.35.6 vs 20.97.9,P<.001). Similarly, among patients (N=73/135) with negative answers(score<3) to "I feel a sense of purpose in my life" those mentioning their"old age" to explain their answer (N=34/73, 46.6%) had higher FACITSpscores than those who did not (26.47.7 vs 22.58.1,P=.02). Conclusion:The FACIT-Sp identifies older people with high spiritual wellbeingbut could underestimate well-being in some older patients. Lowscores on some items could have very different meanings and interpretationof FACIT-Sp global scores below the usual cut-off should becautious.

Weekly sport practice and adolescent well-being.

OBJECTIVE: Sport practice is widely encouraged, both in guidelines and in clinical practice, because of its broad range of positive effects on health. However, very limited evidence directly supports this statement among adolescents and the sport duration that we should recommend remains unknown. We aimed to determine sport durations that were associated with poor well-being. METHODS: We conducted a survey including 1245 adolescents (16-20 years) from the general Swiss population. Participants were recruited from various settings (sport centres, peers of sport practicing adolescents, websites) and asked to complete a web-based questionnaire. Weekly sport practice was categorised into four groups: low (0-3.5 h), average (≈ recommended 7 h (3.6-10.5)), high (≈14 h (10.6-17.5)) and very high (>17.5 h). We assessed well-being using the WHO-5 Well-Being Index. RESULTS: Compared with adolescents in the average group, those in the very high group had a higher risk of poor well-being (OR 2.29 (95% CI 1.11 to 4.72)), as did those in the low group (OR 2.33 (1.58 to 3.44)). In contrast, those in the high group had a lower risk of poor well-being than those in the average group (OR 0.46 (0.23 to 0.93)). CONCLUSIONS: We found an inverted, U-shaped relationship between weekly sport practice duration and well-being among adolescents. The peak scores of well-being were around 14 h per week of sport practice, corresponding to twice the recommended 7 h. Practicing higher sport durations was an independent risk factor of poor well-being.

Springboard - Promoting Family Well-Being: Through Family Support Services

This report is the final evaluation of the three year pilot phase of the Springboard initiative and sets out to answer the question: has Springboard improved the well-being of children and parents and how have its services been received Download the Report here

Family Well-Being and Family Policy - A Review of Research on Benefits and Costs

This report is published under the Springboard Initiative. It is designed to assist in the process of mapping out the complex issues and data requirements which arise in developing policies for families and in finding actions which are known to promote family well-being Download the Report here

SLÃÅN: Mental Health & Social Well-being Report

SLÃÅN: Mental Health & Social Well-being Report Click here to download PDF 2.42mb

Managing health and increasing well-being

The Building the Community-Pharmacy Partnership has worked to improve local health outcomes by encouraging members of the community to develop skills relating to managing their own health, and providing accessible information on the availability of services of which they can avail of. The aim is to facilitate local people to gain knowledge on various health issues through books, videos, leaflets and enable the most vulnerable and in need to access additional support through the pharmacy to complementary therapy. Outcome: A room in the pharmacy has been renovated and offers access to other support services. Funding has allowed the pharmacist to equip the room with videos, leaflets, books etc. There has been an increase in partnership working between the community group, pharmacist and more contact has been made with primary care. Further funding has allowed for the development of a subsidised support referral service for counselling and complementary therapies. As well as this, the pharmacist has worked with local groups to provide information sessions on lifestyle and on health issues identified by the local groups

Survey of Lifestyle, Attitudes and Nutrition in Ireland. Mental Health and Social Well-being Report

SĹN 2007: Older People, Loneliness and Social Support to Mental HealthSĹN, the national Survey of Lifestyle, Attitudes and Nutrition, shows that most Irish adults have a reasonably high level of positive mental health. It is the largest national survey on positive and negative mental health and social well-being in the Irish adult population.��One finding highlights the significance of loneliness and social support to mental health. Finding reveal that 14% of respondents reported being often lonely in the last four weeks, with women, older people and respondents in lower social class groups reporting high levels of loneliness. The SĹN report indicates that being widowed and not being in paid employment are the strongest overall predictors of loneliness. Respondents who are widowed are about five times more likely to feel lonely than those who are married or cohabiting, while 17% of respondents aged 65 and over report being often lonely.��SLAN 2007 highlights the significance of loneliness and social support to mental health. It proposes community-based interventions, including community development approaches and strategies to promote community involvement as a way to tackle such social and health inequities at local level. The report also highlights the importance of implementing the recommendations of the policy document A Vision for Change. It says that protection and promotion of the future health and well-being of the Irish population requires the implementation of effective cross-sectoral policies that will help create and maintain a mentally healthy society, with consequent health, economic and social benefits for all.����SLAN is commissioned by the Department of Health and Children and involved face-to-face interviews with 10,364 respondents aged 18 years and over.��

Guide for World Class Commissioners Promoting Health and Well-being: Reducing Inequalities

One of the core missions of commissioners is to reduce health inequalities. Promoting health and well-being is necessary but not sufficient, and it is essential thatimprovements in commissioning and consequent improvements in service delivery, will not widen the gapbetween different groups in society. It is, of course,already difficult enough to decide how to commission services to promote health and well-being. There are practical, economic and ethical issues involved, but if in addition the commissioner wishes to ensure that the gap between the most healthy and the least healthy does not widen, they will have to think hard and commission carefully. It is also crystal clear that it would be wrong to let 152 Primary Care Trusts find out for themselves how to do this. Firstly, it would be a massive waste of resources, and secondly, many Primary Care Trusts would be unable to deliver. This Guide has been produced by knowledge harvesting; by gathering the knowledge that commissioners have created and accrued, about successes as well as failures; and blending it into a single readable Guide.

The Health and Well-Being of Children and Young People in South East England 2005 (report)

A compendium of facts and figures on the health status and the determinants of the health of children and young people in South East England

Commissioning framework for health and well-being

This framework builds on the White Paper Our health, our care, our say, which promised to help people stay healthy and independent, to give people choice in their care services, to deliver services closer to home and to tackle inequalities. The Commissioning framework for health and well-being sets out the eight steps that health and social care should take in partnership to commission more effectively. It is aimed at commissioners and providers of services in health, social care and local authorities. It is part of the White Paper Our health our care our say implementation.

On the foundations of well-being economics and policy

When one wishes to implement public policies, there is a previous need of comparing different actions and valuating and evaluating them to assess their social attractiveness. Recently the concept of well-being has been proposed as a multidimensional proxy for measuring societal prosperity and progress; a key research topic is then on how we can measure and evaluate this plurality of dimensions for policy decisions. This paper defends the thesis articulated in the following points: 1. Different metrics are linked to different objectives and values. To use only one measurement unit (on the grounds of the so-called commensurability principle) for incorporating a plurality of dimensions, objectives and values, implies reductionism necessarily. 2. Point 1) can be proven as a matter of formal logic by drawing on the work of Geach about moral philosophy. This theoretical demonstration is an original contribution of this article. Here the distinction between predicative and attributive adjectives is formalised and definitions are provided. Predicative adjectives are further distinguished into absolute and relative ones. The new concepts of set commensurability and rod commensurability are introduced too. 3. The existence of a plurality of social actors, with interest in the policy being assessed, causes that social decisions involve multiple types of values, of which economic efficiency is only one. Therefore it is misleading to make social decisions based only on that one value. 4. Weak comparability of values, which is grounded on incommensurability, is proved to be the main methodological foundation of policy evaluation in the framework of well-being economics. Incommensurability does not imply incomparability; on the contrary incommensurability is the only rational way to compare societal options under a plurality of policy objectives. 5. Weak comparability can be implemented by using multi-criteria evaluation, which is a formal framework for applied consequentialism under incommensurability. Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation, in particular, allows considering both technical and social incommensurabilities simultaneously.