Informal caring is of significant and increasing importance in the context of an ageing population, growing pressures on public finances, and increasing life expectancy at older ages. A growing body of research has examined the characteristics associated with informal care provision, as well as the impact of caring for the carer's physical and mental health, and their economic activity. However...

INTRODUCTION Many studies examining the phenomena of medical tourism have identified health equity issues associated with this global health services practice. However, there is a notable lack of attention in this existing research to the informal care provided by the friends and family members who typically accompany medical tourists abroad. To date, researchers have not examined the care role...

Direct out-of-pocket payments for healthcare continue to be a major source of health financing in low-income and middle-income countries. Some of these direct payments take the form of informal charges paid by patients to access the needed healthcare services. Remarkably, however, little is known about the extent to which these payments are exercised and their determinants in the context of Sub...

Learning at the workplace is largely informal and there is a high potential to make it more effective and efficient by means of technology, especially by using the power of multimedia. The main challenge is to find relevant information segments in a vast amount of multimedia resources for a particular objective, context and user. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap using a personalized and...

OBJECTIVE Encouraging help-seeking for mental illness is essential for prevention of suicide. This study examined the relationship between individual characteristics, neighbourhood contexts and help-seeking intentions for mental illness for the purpose of elucidating the role of neighbourhood in the help-seeking process. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS A cross-sectional web-based survey was ...

With the objective of supporting user to enjoy a deep cultural experience, interactive learning tasks and elements are highly needed. It would be a good motivation for the user/visitor as a learner for enjoyable learning. In the previous work, we have proposed an adaptive context-aware model based on the user’s interests with Unified Modeling Language (UML) approach to supported cultural herita...

BACKGROUND Co-operation among staff of local government agencies is essential for good local health services system, especially in small communities. This study aims to explore possible informal relationship patterns among staff of local health and non-health organizations in the context of health decentralization in Thailand. METHODS Tambon Health Promoting Hospital (THPH) and Sub-district A...

In software engineering projects, valuable knowledge is exchanged in informal, unplanned conversations such as watercooler discussions. Projects can benefit if this knowledge is externalized and made accessible to all project participants. Previous solutions for recording project conversation generally do not cover informal communication due to the lack of portability and widespread availabilit...

The Wage Elasticity of Informal Care Supply: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study This paper focuses on the relationship between wages and supply of informal care to elderly parents. Unlike most of the previous research estimating wage elasticities of informal care supply, this study employs instrumental variable technique to account for the fact that the wage rate is likely to be corr...

The aims of this study were to analyse (1) whether informal care, provided by children or grandchildren to their elderly parents, and formal care are substitutes or complements, and (2) whether this relationship differs across Europe. The analyses were based on cross-sectional data from the newly developed SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe) database. We found (1) that in...