Archive for July 2024

“We look at our oncology patients as [the people they were] before they came to us,” said Jessica Kreitman, head of social work at the Dubin Breast Center of the Tisch Cancer Institute and the Tisch Cancer Center at Mount Sinai in New York. “They [had] their own concerns, their own issues, their own financial challenges. And then they received a cancer diagnosis, which doesn’t pause their other concerns and needs.”

“We know nature plays an important role in human health, but behavioral health and health care providers often neglect to think about it as an intervention,” said Joanna Bettmann, a Professor at the University of Utah College of Social Work and lead author on the study. “We set out to distill some evidence-based guidance for those providers.”

The first properly mounted attack on the commercialization of the university came more than a century ago, not in the UK but in the United States. In The Higher Learning in America (1918), Thorstein Veblen, a sociologist and author of the classic analysis of conspicuous consumption The Theory of the Leisure Class, lambasted the growing conception of the university “as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge,” where corporate interests prevail over intellectual ideals. “This incursion of pecuniary ideals in academic policy,” Veblen bemoaned, leads to the “supersession of learning by worldly wisdom”.

Plans to introduce a cap on social care costs – which would limit people’s lifetime care cost contributions to a maximum of £86,000 – in October 2025 will be impossible to deliver, the County Councils Network (CCN) said.

Unison Scotland local government lead David O’Connor said: “We know councils are struggling to recruit carers, social workers and school staff. These are the essential services we all rely on. Local government can no longer be neglected like this.”

Japan’s “super-ageing” society, where the proportion of older people is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, has put immense pressure on the workforce. Advances in technology are stepping in to address these challenges, but also present issues for the world’s largest health profession: nurses.