NEW

A propensity-matched cohort of 1,908 older adults using adult day services in Japan finds those attending services staffed with physiotherapists and occupational therapists had a significantly slower observed decline in activities of daily living over 24 months than those attending unstaffed equivalents.

A South Korean validation study finds an automated interactive-voice-response frailty screening tool performs comparably to the Clinical Frailty Scale, offering a scalable, low-tech case-finding model for community-dwelling older adults.

A national Australian workforce-planning model projects that specialist palliative care supply will fail to keep pace with mortality-driven demand through 2045, with outer regional areas bearing a disproportionate share of unmet need.

A retrospective cohort of almost 980,000 US hospital encounters finds only 26.6% had documentation of a medical power of attorney, with documentation varying significantly by sex, marital status and diagnosis.

A UK policy scoping review finds current Hospital at Home implementation criteria risk excluding people with dementia who lack digital proficiency or carer support, even though such schemes could otherwise reduce inequalities for this group.

A nine-centre Italian retrospective study of 160 patients treated with long-acting lipoglycopeptides in a day-hospital setting reports an 86.8% clinical success rate and a low adverse-event rate, with modelled cost savings the authors describe as hypothesis-generating rather than proven.

A Bayesian component network meta-analysis of individual participant data from 30 trials finds strengthening social support, behavioural activation and problem management drive most of the benefit in non-specialist-delivered psychosocial interventions, while specialist techniques such as cognitive reframing showed detrimental effects when delivered by non-specialists.

A randomised controlled trial finds that adding three months of tailored primary-care physiotherapy and occupational therapy rehabilitation to device-aided Parkinson's disease therapy improves motor-skill maintenance and perceived health at 6 and 12 months compared with device-aided therapy alone.

Baseline analysis of a Swedish randomised trial shows a simple, reproducible case-finding rule can identify multimorbid, frequent emergency attenders as a target group for proactive community assessment.

A nationally representative English cohort finds loneliness affects almost a third of adults aged 50 and over with severe breathlessness, with deprivation, living alone and depressive symptoms the strongest predictors.

A multicentre randomised trial finds 12 weeks of self-administered dual-task balance training, with only a sixth of sessions supervised, nearly halved the fall rate compared with self-administered single-task training.

A new position paper proposes a standardised composite outcome, MACE-Cog, to address widespread inconsistency and incompleteness in how cognitive decline is measured and reported after stroke and cardiac interventions.

A national retrospective cohort of over 200,000 deceased patients in England finds no significant ethnic disparity in overall primary-care palliative identification, but ethnic minority patients were more likely to enter via specialist referral, with differing survival by ethnic group.

A nationwide Finnish register study finds patients with pancreatic cancer who had specialist palliative care contact more than 30 days before death were hospitalised far less often, and far more likely to receive care at home, in their final month of life.

A secondary analysis of a randomised trial finds a brief GP-delivered intervention for ICU survivors with PTSD symptoms produced a delayed but clinically meaningful quality-of-life improvement at 12 months.

A UK multicentre RCT finds occupational-therapy-delivered job-retention vocational rehabilitation shows no benefit over self-help advice on work limitations at 12 months, and was not cost-effective from an NHS perspective.

A PROSPERO-registered systematic review identifies the structural and process determinants that distinguish nursing homes that implement advance care planning well from those that do not.

A systematic review of 12 randomised trials finds app- and web-based telerehabilitation performs comparably to centre-based cardiac rehabilitation after acute coronary syndrome or revascularisation, with gains in adherence and quality of life.

A US retrospective cohort of over 1,100 outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy patients finds midline catheters carry more than three times the complication risk of peripherally inserted central catheters.

A Finnish retrospective cohort finds cancer patients enrolled in a structured, paramedic-delivered end-of-life protocol spent more time at home and died at home six times more often than those not enrolled.

A Chartered Society of Physiotherapy member survey finds 49% of NHS hospital physiotherapists report losing rehabilitation space, with members linking the loss to rising waiting lists and worsening patient disability.

A large multicentre cohort finds 17% of adults are in a distinct 'multidomain vulnerability' group a year after returning home following severe traumatic brain injury, predicted by identifiable risk factors.

A meta-analysis of eight randomised trials finds mobile-health-supported remote or hybrid cardiac rehabilitation performs as well as, or better than, centre-based rehabilitation on exercise capacity in heart failure, though certainty is low to moderate.

A UK feasibility cluster trial tests whether a dashboard giving First Contact Physiotherapists individualised feedback on their own referral patterns can reduce unwarranted variation in musculoskeletal care decisions.