Affordable, good quality childcare creates opportunities for many parents to better reconcile work and care or reduces family care to enable other valuable contributions to society. However, childcare studies often overlook parents of children with additional or complex care needs. These parents spend a greater amount of time on caregiving, providing care that goes beyond that of parents of typically developing children. As such, their opportunities beyond caregiving can be limited. Resources, like childcare services, can be crucial in supporting the reconciliation of care with other valued activities in life. This article contributes to the cross-national childcare policy literature by conceptualizing comparative indicators to assess the availability, accessibility, and affordability of childcare policy design for children with additional or complex care needs. It then applies these indicators to a comparison of childcare policy design in England and the Netherlands, providing an operationalization for further empirical analysis.

Employment rates of people with and without disabilities differ substantially in most countries, and policymakers have tried, with mixed effects, to reduce this gap through different policy measures. However, studies show that governance and managerial reforms also affect implementation of policy. In this study, we examine how the Danish large-scale administrative reform of 2007 has affected the role and structure of the approach of the public employment system (PES) to unemployed people with disabilities. Using Pollitt and Bouckeart’s framework on reform effects, we report on a document analysis of policy papers and a 2019 survey of caseworkers and disability keypersons (N = 453). The analysis identifies few and vague objectives on a process and systems level, with the overall goal being more coherent service delivery. Specifically, a new division of tasks between the state and municipal level was established, including the creation of a disability keyperson at the municipal level to inform and guide job centre colleagues in assisting unemployed with disabilities. In practice, most of the keypersons were doing administrative casework and placed in sections focussed on unemployed with a reduced work ability. Hence, we identify a mismatch between objectives and implementation, questioning whether service delivery has become more coherent.

Introduction: Frailty is a common condition among older individuals and is associated with increased vulnerability to adverse health outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the impact of viral infections on frail individuals.

Objectives: This study assessed the functional and clinical analysis changes in frail patients before and after SARS- CoV-2. This study evaluated the functional and clinical changes in frailty patients before and after SARS-CoV-2 infection in a cohort of 20 frailty patients of a long-stay facility.

Methods: Demographic, clinical, and functional data, including the Barthel index, Katz index, and Mini-Mental Examination, were collected. Clinical analyses were also conducted, including a complete blood count and biochemical profile. The functional and clinical analyses were compared before and after SARS-CoV-2 infection using t-tests. Pearson’s correlation was used to analyze the relationship between functionality, frailty, and clinical biomarkers.

Results: The cohort had a mean age of 84 ± 2.42 years, with 80% female. The most common comorbidities were Arterial Hypertension, Diabetes Mellitus type II, and Alzheimer’s disease. The functional assessment showed a significant increase in functional dependence on basic activities of daily living after the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Significant differences were also observed in grooming, bowel, and bladder control. Clinicals biomarkers, such as albumin, showed substantial changes post-infection.

Conclusions: The findings indicate worsening functional dependence and changes in clinical biomarkers after an illness. These results emphasize the need for targeted interventions and support for frail individuals during viral outbreaks. Further research is warranted to explore the long-term consequences of COVID-19 on frailty and develop strategies to mitigate its impact.

This study explores the impact of vulnerability appeals during the COVID-19 pandemic using a nationally representative, preregistered survey experiment (N = 4,087) conducted in mid-2021. We explore whether providing citizens with information about the vulnerability of ethnic minority and disabled citizens to COVID-19 fosters empathy and increased support for behavioral restrictions. We observe minimal statistically significant or substantive effects, although the presence of subtle effects cannot be entirely ruled out. We identify some limited indications that individuals with disabilities exhibit increased support for restrictions when exposed to information about the vulnerability of disabled people to COVID-19, but these effects are inconsistent. Therefore, our findings provide limited evidence to confirm or rule out that using vulnerability appeals alone is effective for influencing public attitudes toward behavioral restrictions. The findings point toward avenues for future research, including a closer examination of heterogeneous responses to public health messaging among population subgroups.

Successful employment outcomes are often beyond the reach of people with disabilities, but relatively little is known about the factors that best enable the achievement of this goal. Using survey data from 803 people with and without disabilities, we examine the association of eight factors with successful employment outcomes. Using regression tree analysis, five factors emerged as statistically significant predictors of successful employment outcomes for people with disabilities: corporate culture and climate, job characteristics, government support, employer attitudes, and societal attitudes. Key interrelationships between factors include: (1) government support linking with corporate culture and climate; and (2) job characteristics linking with corporate culture and climate. Findings are relevant to organisations and governments to inform policy and practice to improve employment outcomes for people with disabilities.

Since the 1960s sign languages have been identified as natural human languages and conceived of as a key feature of Deaf culture and identity. Eschewing the notion of disability, deaf advocacy organisations have connected the use of sign language to linguistic and cultural rights. Despite the clear preference of deaf advocates, the legal protection of sign languages remains uneven and somewhat difficult to grasp, being situated at the intersection of disability rights and linguistic rights. Few attempts have been made to identify the extent to which sign languages are recognised and enshrined within domestic legal systems. This article aims to propose a novel taxonomy that focuses on the normative conceptualisation of sign language and deaf people in national legislation. Based on a comparative analysis and focusing on European Union Member States, it identifies three main approaches: an explicit ‘minority’ approach—ie the express recognition of deaf persons as a linguistic minority; a more nuanced ‘cultural approach’—which acknowledges sign language as autonomous language and provides for promotional measures; and a ‘disability’ approach—which mandates and/or promotes the use of sign language primarily as an accessibility measure.

Disability and mental ill-health may be especially prevalent in Somalia, largely due to a protracted armed conflict and its consequent humanitarian crises. Little, if any, research to date, however, has simultaneously explored disability- and mental health-related factors in the Somali context. Using both descriptive and regression analytical techniques, we aimed to determine how increasing levels of functional impairment reported across different disability domains (i.e., visual, hearing and cognition), number of concomitant disabilities, and other empirically supported variables (such as employment and sex) are associated with the likelihood of self-identifying the need for mental health support among a sample (N = 1,355) of Somalis with disabilities, as well as identify the common barriers to such support. Despite most participants self-identifying a need for mental health support, only 15% were able to access it, with the most common barriers being the cost of services and the unavailability of local services. Being female, married, and having increasing levels of functional difficulty in the cognitive, mobility and self-care domains of disability were each significantly associated with an increased likelihood of the self-identified need for mental health support. This study’s findings highlight potential points of prioritisation for mental health policy and programming in Somalia. A Somali version of this abstract can be found in the Supplementary Material.