Background The aim of this study was to further validate PainChek®, an electronic pain assessment instrument, with a population living with dementia in a UK care home. Method This study utilised a correlational design to evaluate the psychometric properties of PainChek® when compared to the Abbey Pain Scale (APS). Blinded paired pain assessments were completed at rest and immediately post-movement by a researcher and a nurse. A total of 22 participants with a diagnosis of moderate-to-severe dementia and a painful condition were recruited using opportunity sampling. Results Overall, 302 paired assessments were collected for 22 participants. Out of these 179 were conducted during rest and 123 were immediately post-movement. The results demonstrated a positive significant correlation between overall PainChek® pain scores and overall APS pain scores (r = 0.818, N = 302, p < .001, one-tailed), satisfactory internal consistency (α = 0.810), moderate single measure intraclass correlation (ICC = 0.680) and substantial inter-rater agreement (κ = 0.719). Conclusions PainChek® has demonstrated to be a valid and reliable instrument to assess the presence and severity of pain in people with moderate-to-severe dementia living in aged care.

This study aimed to record and characterise tweets related to dementia, to investigate their content and sentiment. Data were extracted from Twitter over a period of six weeks during February and March 2019 and then analysed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and AntWordProfiler. Using five search terms related to dementia, this study collected 860,383 tweets (more than 27 million words). Results have shown that out of all the collected tweets, 48.63 percent of tweets related to the search term ‘dementia’, 49.95 percent to ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ and the remainder related to frontotemporal dementia, Lewy Body dementia and vascular dementia. People wrote more positively and personally about the term ‘dementia’ than the other terms, and more technically regarding the term ‘Alzheimer’s disease’. All search terms had a negative emotional tone overall. Dementia and related terms are commonly discussed on Twitter. The overall negative emotional tone associated with all dementia related search terms suggests that dementia is still largely stigmatised and talked about negatively. Recommendations for future research include the development of a health world list or a dementia world list, and to consider how the results of this research inform social change interventions going forwards.

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It is well established that secondary trauma is a phenomenon that affects professionals in a range of health and social care settings, including social work. Whilst students going into placement are often exposed to similar experiences as qualified colleagues, limited research has been undertaken to investigate whether students suffer secondary trauma from their placement experience. This quantitative exploratory study of forty-five students on a Social Work and a Health and Social Care undergraduate degree course examined the potential impact of secondary trauma in placements using a Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale. This article will explore secondary trauma, how students are prepared for placement and student well-being in general. The findings of the study indicated that no students appear to have suffered from secondary trauma in placements, suggesting that there may be other potential support mechanisms that could have reduced, impacted or negated the issue. A discussion of some of these mechanisms is explored. Finally, this article calls for educators and professionals in higher education and placement agencies/organisations to be aware of the potential impact on student well-being.