We examined the characteristics of a self-report measure for assessing perceptions of parents, the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), in an adolescent community sample (N = 2,147; mean age = 15.4 years). Using factor analysis, three PBI dimensions were identified--the original Care factor and two Protection factors: perceived social control and personal intrusiveness. Important sex differences were found which were not evident in the two factor structure recommended by Parker [1,2]. Relative to sons, daughters saw their fathers as more personally intrusive and their mothers as less socially controlling and much more caring. Overall, adolescents perceived mothers as more caring but more personally intrusive than fathers. Adolescents who saw their father as uncaring and their mother as controlling tended to have the least positive psychosocial profiles.

Constipation management is in need of improvement. This improvement is more likely to be achieved with a thorough initial assessment and ongoing daily monitoring with evaluation. A practical, user-friendly documentation system that facilitates this has been developed at Marie Curie Hospice, Solihull. It is currently being used with great success in a hospice inpatient setting and is transferable to hospitals. With some modification it could be used by district nurses and general practitioners in the community. It is an important step towards improving the management of constipation.

Palliative care must change, grow and mature in response to the growing number and complexity of needs of community patients. Such demands particularly challenge conventional delivery of day hospice. In response our hospice redesigned day service provision to modernise bespoke day facilities, appoint a day hospice sister and introduce several novel clinical interventions. Patient outcome measures were introduced and research projects undertaken.The aim of the study was to evaluate whether extended day hospice services could address more patient needs. Newly developed services were introduced in the period April 2015 – May 2016. Management and clinical key performance indicators were obtained for this period and compared with annual data from the previous year. Two facilitated focus groups were undertaken with the multidisciplinary team and with the management team to better understand the service developments and participant’s aspirations for day services.It was found that introducing five additional patient services – Blood transfusion clinic; Progressive Supranuclear Palsy support group; Motor Neurone Disease clinic; Multi System Atrophy support group and a Carers’ support group – led to a 27% increase in attendances. Staff, patients and their families were recruited to three research projects by three hospice staff as a core part of their role, and five staff contributed to qualitative studies or data collection. The qualitative data indicated that staff were pioneering the new well-coordinated services but were challenged by the time available to capture data. The management team had a vision for further expansion of sustainable services and innovative approaches of working in partnership with the local acute trust and community care providers.In conclusion, a diversification of day services offered to patients and carers can be facilitated with engaged managerial and professional staff without a significant increase in core workforce.

together to report on the educational and financial value of education plans. Results The work of the Clinical Support Analyst is enabling standardisation of the data collection. The CPF has collated four months of activity data, manipulating visual representations of the data to analyse his time allocation. Using an electronic booking system gives a streamlined process for the organisers and attendees, making more efficient use of administration time. Conclusions The work is ongoing, initial conclusions are as follows. The Clinical Support Analyst prompted a formalisation of data requests and rigorous recording of the time work takes him to complete. It has also highlighted that the data from the electronic patient notes does not match the data collected locally. The CPF has found that the App has to be used with rigour to ensure full data capture. Not all members of staff are confident enough to book their own training and do not read their emails in a timely way.