Research on safety in home care for older adults: A bibliometric analysis

From hospital-centered care to home-centered care of older people: propositions for research and development

PURPOSE

Providing high-quality and cost-efficient care of older people is an important development priority for many health and social care systems in the world. This paper suggests a shift from acute, episodic and reactive hospital-centered care toward longitudinal, person-centered and proactive home-centered care. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge of a comprehensive development strategy for designing and providing home-centered care of older people.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH

The study design is based on qualitative research with an inductive approach. The authors study development initiatives at the national, regional and local levels of the Swedish health and social care system. The data collection methods included interviews (n = 54), meeting observations (n = 25) and document studies (n = 59).

FINDINGS

The authors describe findings related to policy actions and system changes, attempts to achieve collaboration, integration and coordination, new forms of care offerings, characteristics of work settings at home and differences in patients' roles and participation at home and in the hospital.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

The authors suggest home-centered care as a solution for providing person-centered and integrated care of older people and give examples of how this can be achieved.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE

The authors outline five propositions for research and development related to national policies, service modularity as a solution for customized and coordinated care, developing human resources and infrastructure for home settings, expanding services that enable older people living at home and patient co-creation.

Identification of Contributing Factors of Falls and Non-Fall Accidents Among Home Care Clients: A Retrospective Study Using Incident Reports

To prevent falls and other accidents among home care clients, it is essential to gather high-quality information on the factors contributing to the accidents. Incident reporting systems are used in home care units to generate information for risk management. This study aimed to explore the contributing factors of falls and non-fall accidents among home care clients and to evaluate the accuracy of the information on contributing factors gained from the incident reporting system. An existing dataset was used—safety incident reports concerning accidents involving home care clients. The incident reports (n = 323) were stored in the social- and health care organization’s incident reporting database from 2018 to 2020. The free-text narratives describing factors contributing to the event’s occurrence were analyzed using inductive content analysis, and the frequencies of the main category codes were recorded. The results were then compared with the frontline managers’ analyses of the narratives, where the managers used the classification of contributing factors provided by the system. According to incident reports, intrinsic (person-specific), behavior-related and extrinsic (environment-related) factors contributed to accidents among home care clients. Intrinsic and behavior-related factors were reported more often than extrinsic factors. The classified information on contributing factors did not correspond in all respects to the descriptions in the incident reports. To ensure high-quality information for safety management, incident reporting tools must be appropriate for use in the home care context. Both the reporter of an adverse event and the individual responsible for analyzing the report play essential roles in identifying contributing factors of accidents.

Home Cancer Care Research: A Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis (1990-2021)

Home cancer care research (HCCR) has accelerated, as considerable attention has been placed on reducing cancer-related health costs and enhancing cancer patients' quality of life. Understanding the current status of HCCR can help guide future research and support informed decision-making about new home cancer care (HCC) programs. However, most current studies mainly detail the research status of certain components, while failing to explore the knowledge domain of this research field as a whole, thereby limiting the overall understanding of home cancer care. We carried out bibliometric and visualization analyses of Scopus-indexed papers related to home cancer care published between 1990-2021, and used VOSviewer scientometric software to investigate the status and provide a structural overview of the knowledge domain of HCCR (social, intellectual, and conceptual structures). Our findings demonstrate that over the last three decades, the research on home cancer care has been increasing, with a constantly expanding stream of new papers built on a solid knowledge base and applied to a wide range of research themes.

'We just have to make it work': a qualitative study on assistant nurses' experiences of patient safety performance in home care services using forum play scenarios

OBJECTIVE

Safety is essential to support independent living among the rising number of people with long-term healthcare and social care needs. Safety performance in home care leans heavily on the capacity of unlicensed staff to respond to problems and changes in the older patients' functioning and health. The aim of this study is to explore assistant nurses' adaptive responses to everyday work to ensure safe care in the home care context.

DESIGN

A qualitative approach using the drama-based learning and reflection technique forum play with subsequent group interviews. The audio-recorded interviews were transcribed and analysed with thematic analysis.

SETTING

Home care services organisations providing care to older people in their private homes in two municipalities in southern Sweden.

PARTICIPANTS

Purposeful sampling of 24 assistant nurses and three managers from municipal home care services and a local geriatric hospital clinic.

RESULTS

Home care workers' adaptive responses to provide safe home care were driven by an ambition to 'make it work in the best interests of the person' by adjusting to and accommodating care recipient needs and making autonomous decisions that expanded the room for manoeuvrability, while weighing risks of a trade-off between care standards and the benefits for the community-dwelling older people's independent living. Adaptations to ensure information transfer and knowledge acquisition across disciplines and borders required reciprocity.

CONCLUSIONS

Safety performance in home care service is dependent on the staff closest to the older people, who deal with safety risks and ethical dilemmas on a day-to-day basis and their access to information, competence, and resources that fit the demands. A proactive leadership characterised by mutual trust and adequate support for decision making is suggested. Managers and decision-makers across healthcare and social care need to consider how they can develop interprofessional collaborations and adaptive routines supporting safety from a broader perspective.

Profiling the Research Landscape on Cognitive Aging: A Bibliometric Analysis and Network Visualization

Objectives

This study aimed to profile the cognitive aging research landscape from 1956 to 2021.

Methods

A total of 3,779 documents were retrieved from the Scopus database for the bibliometric analysis and network visualization. By comparing each keyword's overall connection strength (centrality), frequency (density), and average year of publication (novelty) to the calculated median values acquired from the overlay view of the VOSviewer map, the enhanced strategic diagrams (ESDs) were constructed.

Results

The findings showed an increasing trend in the number of publications. The United States leads the contributing countries in cognitive aging research. The scientific productivity pattern obeyed Lotka's law. The most productive researcher was Deary, I. J., with the highest number of publications. The collaborative index showed an increasing trend from 1980 onwards. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience is the most prestigious journal in the field of cognitive aging research. In Bradford core journals zone 1, the top 10 core journals of cognitive aging research provided more than half of the total articles (697, or 55.36 percent).

Conclusions

For the next decades, the trending topics in cognitive aging research include neuropsychological assessment, functional connectivity, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), decision-making, gender, compensation, default mode network, learning and memory, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), obesity, D-galactose, epigenetics, frailty, mortality, mini-mental state examination (MMSE), anxiety, and gait speed.

Progress on Pharmaceutical Sciences/Pharmacy Postgraduate Education: a Bibliometric Perspective

Objective

The study quantitatively investigated the related research progress in pharmaceutical sciences/pharmacy education from a bibliometric angle and provided feasible suggestions to facilitate the development of pharmaceutical sciences/pharmacy postgraduate education.

Methods

Bibliometric analysis was conducted using the database of Web of Science Core Collection. The literature published in 1985–2021 was screened and selected. The overall profile description, citation analysis, and research hotspot mining were performed using the citation report of Clarivate Analytics, bibliometrics online platform, and VOSviewer software. The bibliometric results and profiles were plotted and illustrated.

Results

The bibliometric analysis of 485 papers of interest showed that the research frontier was continuously expanding; especially the institutions from the USA were the main contributors. The numbers of citing papers have been ascending, and a considerable part of citations were from the areas other than the education research. Mining results showed that the in-school and residency education of pharmacy postgraduates was a research hotspot, as well as interprofessional training and new education styles for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) therapy were the emerging trends in the field.

Conclusion

Through the analysis of the studies, it was found that encouraging relevant research programs, establishing financial supports, and launching specified publication sources could be helpful to boost the development of pharmaceutical sciences/pharmacy postgraduate education. Besides, the results suggested that this was a less discussed topic and was worthy for the investigators to pay more attention to such an issue.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12247-021-09611-z.

Research on safety in home care for older adults: A bibliometric analysis

AIM

This study aimed to describe and visualize the current research state and collaborative networks in home care safety for older adults over the past 11 years to analyse the gaps of research and future research trends.

BACKGROUND

The amount of research on safety in home care for older adults is increasing. It is necessary to understand the status of development and main research topics and identify the main contributors and their relationships.

METHODS

A total of 2,631 publications were retrieved from the Web of Science. The external characteristics of the publications were summarized with the Web of Science and Histcite. Collaborative networks and keywords were analysed and visually displayed using analysis tools.

RESULTS

The number of articles increased over the years. Articles were identified from 79 countries, 3,630 institutions, 647 journals and 11,691 authors, and complex cooperative relations among them and five research topics were identified.

CONCLUSION

Research on home care safety for older adults is developing steadily, and this field may be understood to a greater extent in the future. Countries, institutions and scholars need to cooperate more in this research field.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT

This study contributes important information for understanding achievements in the research field of home care safety and provides insights into future research.