NHS morale. Singing the blues

Focus groups of clinical directors, managers, doctors and nurses felt morale and motivation were generally low in their organisations. They thought staff no longer felt valued by politicians and that this had affected the public's perception of the NHS. A mismatch between central initiatives and what the local service required was seen as a source of stress. A sense of being valued was seen as the key motivator for staff.     

Greying blues

This article focuses on the social, economic, emotional, and spiritual context of aging. As human beings traverse the natural progression of life and enters old age, several issues are raised due to a number of physical, mental, and social changes that occurs. Such changes may limit movements, foster dependency and cause depression, and anxiety. Moreover, economic insecurity and the existence of health problems compound the situation. Population aging creates a problem to the national and international public health, particularly on the work force and social and security scheme. Each country addresses the problem based on its existing economic and social condition. Considering the economic and health constraints of aging, affordable and quality health care is of great importance to the welfare of older people. Any policy for the aged should therefore aim at addressing the health problems from the beginning to enable the people to grow old with minimum disabilities and chronic diseases. There is a need to reorient health care systems, social services, and employment practices to meet the needs of the aging population, thereby making this world a better place for them.     

Retirement blues

This paper analyses the short- and longer-term effects of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state pension ages in an individual-fixed effects instrumental-variable set-up, borrowing intuitions from the regression-discontinuity design literature, to deal with endogeneity in retirement behaviour. The results display no short-term effects of retirement on mental health, but a large negative longer-term impact. This impact survives a battery of robustness tests, and applies to women and men as well as people of different educational and occupational backgrounds similarly. Overall, the findings suggest that reforms inducing people to postpone retirement are not only important for making pension systems solvent, but with time could also pay a mental health dividend among the elderly and reduce public health care costs.