July issue of Age & Ageing now available

(This is a corrected version of a blog published last week) 

The July 2015 issue of Age and Ageing, the journal of the British Geriatrics Society is out now!

A full table of contents is available here, with editorials, research papers, reviews, short reports, case reports book reviews and more. Hot topics this issue include:

• Pharmacotherapy for type 2 diabetes
• Exercise regimens and bone health
• Balance training for in-patient rehabilitations
• What are frailty instruments for?
• Oestrogen replacement in postmenopausal women

The Editor’s View can be read here.

This issue’s free access papers are:

• Systematic review of EASY-Care needs assessment for community-dwelling older people
• Patterns in health-related behaviours and fall injuries among older people: a population-based study in Stockholm
• A comparison of subjective and objective measures of physical activity from the Newcastle 85+ study

EASY-Care and needs assessment

Chris Craig is a Research Assistant at NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care East Midlands, at the University of Nottingham. He has been working on a study called ‘Supporting Older People’s Resilience through Assessment of Needs and Outcomes’ (SOPRANO).  Here, he discusses a new Age & Ageing paper on EASY-Care on which he was corresponding author.

EASY-Care is a Comprehensive Geriatric Needs Assessment tool. It consists of 49 core questions covering physical, mental, social and environmental domains. For a tool accredited to be used as part of the Single Assessment Procedure in England, we expected to find literature documenting EASY-Care’s use in the community. However literature retrieved in our systematic search did not report implementation of the tool in practice. Our review summarises trials, reviews, commentaries and opinion pieces detailing EASY-Care’s validity, and acceptability.