DOES LONELINESS CAUSE INCREASED HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE SERVICE USE BY OLDER PEOPLE? AN EVALUATION OF THE EVIDENCE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Loneliness in later life in the UK is generating a moral panic because of the consequences for the health and social care system of the increased demand generated by lonely older people. Loneliness for older people has been linked with increased use of primary care services, attendance at accident and emergency units, admission to acute hospitals and admissions to care homes. A comprehensive literature review identified 9 papers that reported service use for both lonely and not lonely people aged 50+ in Canada, the USA, Sweden, Singapore and Britain. Studies looked at the use of primary care, emergency department, hospital in-patient admissions and nursing home admissions and were generally small scale, use self-reported service use outcomes and are cross-sectional in design. Limitations in our current evidence base which do not support the extravagant claims made for the consequences of loneliness, in terms of service use, and subsequent costs.
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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 | 0.032 | 0.112 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".