Impacts on practitioners of using research-based carer assessment tools: experiences from the UK, Canada and Sweden, with insights from Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers and practitioners in several Western countries have recently developed tools for assessing the situation of the carers of adults who are ill, elderly or have disabilities. The present article describes the impact of three such assessment tools, from Canada, the UK and Sweden, on the professional practice of assessors. All tools were tested in agency-based studies. Focus groups, workshops and interviews with assessors were employed to understand the impact on professionals and their practice. An Australian researcher and case manager comments on these experiences from her unique perspective. The results reveal that the use of carer assessments can lead to changes in the appropriateness of intervention by informing practitioners of issues which are given little attention, but which impact on the adequacy of interventions to the service user. Across the projects, most workers found that the tools facilitated a more comprehensive, in-depth and carer-focused assessment. Experience across all the projects suggests that, used sensitively, such tools and approaches can play a key role in transforming the relationship between carers, and the health and social care system. Giving carers a legitimate voice, acknowledging their perspective and expertise, and making them central to assessment processes accords them status both as active partners, and as individuals with their own needs and aspirations, rather than seeing them primarily as resources. As a result of their experiences, many workers and administrators concluded that home-care programmes must change their mandate to include carers among their clients, raising the issue of available monetary and human resources to meet the needs of this group. In addition, as our Australian colleague points out, time, efficiency, relevance, benefit and minimal intrusiveness are important factors for practitioners which influence their use of assessment tools.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.080 | 0.115 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".