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Can therapeutic hypothermia in infants with mild neonatal hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy be an effective treatment technique in preventing adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes? A systematic review
Full text linkAbstract
Background: Hypoxic Ischaemic Encephalopathy (HIE) is one of the leading causes of neonatal deaths and often results in suboptimal neurocognitive development in the affected children. The use of therapeutic hypothermia (TH) to treat or reduce the severity of the effects in moderate and severe cases has been researched and carried out as part of national guidelines for years. However, a recent therapeutic creep of the use of TH in mild HIE has shined a light on the knowledge gap of this treatment and initiated several trials worldwide to observe its effects in those with milder cases.
Methods: Initially, a PICO format was used to provide the basis of the research being conducted, as well as specific criteria to look for in the search for appropriate literature. PubMed, Medline, Embase and OVID were used to conduct a thorough literature search for systematic reviews comparing the outcomes of infants with mild HIE that underwent cooling treatment vs supportive management. The papers found were then filtered through a set of inclusion and exclusion criteria. The remaining 4 studies were quality appraised using the CASP tool. Subsequently, data extraction followed, including an analysis of the results of each chosen study, in order to reach an unbiased conclusion of the available literature.
Results: Some studies have suggested TH is an effective treatment that should be part of official treatment guidelines, exploring the neuroprotective effects of TH. Furthermore, some studies even state cooling in mild HIE has the potential to reverse damage, to get patients onto the same cognitive basis as their healthy peers. Others err on the side of caution, with concern over its safety and negative effects on the patients receiving it, including prolonged hospital stays, delayed enteral feeding, parent-child separation and largely increased resource utilisation, as well as expenses.
Conclusions: Despite the potential for better treatment options and both short- and long-term outcomes for children born with mild HIE, due to the unclear results of the reviewed studies, it cannot be stated for certain whether using TH in mild HIE is an appropriate and safe management method. Therefore, it is essential for further large-scale trials to take place to establish the efficacy and safety of this treatment in mild HIE
Lawful, Proportionate and Necessary? A Critical Examination of the Domestic Abuse Disclosure Scheme for Scotland
Full text linkThis article critically examines Police Scotland’s Disclosure Scheme for Domestic Abuse Scotland (DSDAS). The scheme establishes a “right to ask” and a “power to tell” individuals about their partner or ex-partner’s known history of abusive behaviour. In this article, we focus on four key aspects of DSDAS: its accessibility, its legal basis, its understanding of “domestic abuse”, and its approach to defining the kinds of relationships where disclosures can be made under the policy. We identify ambiguities in all four aspects of the scheme, which we show departs in significant ways from the understandings of domestic abuse and qualifying relationships written into Scots law and policy. In contrast with the approach taken in England and Wales, we show the Scottish scheme does not currently permit police disclosures to be made after the “end” of a relationship – a concept which is itself significantly underdefined in the scheme guidance. We conclude with three practical recommendations for how these elements of the DSDAS scheme can be improved to enhance the accessibility, clarity, and coherence of the disclosure policy
Discovering Playwork: Developing a Knowledge Base for the Playwork Profession.
Full text linkBackground: This study formed part of the International Playwork Census. It provides important data about how playworkers and non-playworkers who use a playwork approach in their work with children were first introduced to playwork and the playwork literature they had read.
Method: The data was collected through an online survey the International Playwork Census (IPC) and focuses on two qualitative open-ended questions on how people first heard of playwork and what playwork literature they accessed.
Results: How people first heard of playwork was analysed using thematic analysis and three themes were constructed from three sources: provision (being employed); education (studying a playwork course) or promotion (attending a conference). When asked what playwork-related literature participants had accessed, non-playworkers were more likely to access and read published playwork books than playworkers.
Conclusions: This difference raises several important questions about the future development of the playwork profession, particularly in the area of sector-specific knowledge development.
#HonouringIndigenousWriters: Visiting with and through Indigenous Literatures in the “Digital Turn”
Full text linkIn 2017, in partnership with the UBC Longhouse and UBC Libraries,the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the University of British Columbia Library began the annual “Honouring Indigenous Writers Edit-athon.” Each year, building out of events such as the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-athon, our team of organizers work with Indigenous authors to improve the representation of Indigenous literatures online. We build consensual relationship with authors to revise Wikipedia pages, distribute organizer kits to interested collaborators, maintain an event dashboard, and host live readings from new and established Indigenous authors in Vancouver, Kelowna, and Alberta. The event itself is inspired by Daniel Heath Justice’s hashtag #HonouringIndigneousWriters, which he began on Twitter in 2015 to draw attention to the wide range of literatures available by Indigenous authors. With Justice’s consent, we build on his good work by furthering the reach of Indigenous literatures in digital and physical spaces.
In this article, I suggest that #HonouringIndigenousWriters illustrates that any attempt to squarely demarcate boundaries between offline and online communities risks eliding the nuanced facets of relationality that are core to Indigenous literary studies. Bronwyn Carlson argues that in Indigenous engagements with the digital, there is often “no distinction between online and offline worlds; they are seamlessly enmeshed”. Productively blurring the boundary between online and offline worlds informs what critical and ethical and relational engagement in the digital must look like. Via a history of #HonouringIndigenousWriters, written from my perspective as one if its co-founders, I hope to illustrate how, as scholars of Indigenous literary studies, we can draw online and offline worlds into closer proximity and, as Warren Cariou urges us, find places to visit with stories
“#Death”: The Urban NDN Nature Poem in Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem
No full textThe running gag throughout Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem (2017) is that Teebs—Pico’s fictional alter ego—cannot write a traditional American Indian nature poem. This essay contends that, despite the absence of nature poetry in Nature Poem, Teebs presents an alternative take on a nature poem on pages 32–33. This untitled poem, which I refer to as “Death Poem” for the sake of convenience, consists entirely of multimedia excerpts from American television commercials and advertisements, films, songs, and poems chopped up to mimic the fast-paced, sensory-overloaded, and discombobulating features of the digital urban environment. Moreover, in this intertextual mélange, a “#death” hashtag flanks the end of each line, evoking an ominous mood. At first glance, Teebs’ bricolage poem presents a dark, hectic image of digital realms and the urban NDN experience within it. Nevertheless, this essay reveals that more sanguine interpretations lie beneath the poem’s critical surface when each line’s source, context, and cultural significance are decoded. More specifically, I believe Teebs’ invocation of prominent Black musicians in the final segment of the poem inadvertently coalesces historical Black resilience with NDN urbanization in the digital age. Ultimately, this essay argues that, through the aid of Black music, the untitled poem on pages 32–33 of Pico’s Nature Poem can be viewed as a reimaginative world- and -future-building exercise that presents new forward momentum and possibilities of meaning for a distressed Teebs—and, perhaps, by extension, the general urban NDN population—in digital landscapes
Eroticism as a Series of Offerings: Keynote Address for the 42nd American Indian Workshop
Full text linkInsights from a Medical Elective in New Zealand
Full text linkThis article was written following a period of elective study by a final year medical student in Whangarei, New Zealand. It gives an insight into the provision of healthcare in New Zealand along with the population health and Māori culture. It aims to highlight the benefits of conducting a period of elective study, particularly in terms of personal and professional development
To Choose Responsibility: (Queer) Indigenous Existentialism in A History of My Brief Body
Full text linkBilly-Ray Belcourt’s (Driftpile Cree) collection of intensely emotional essays in A History of My Brief Body is dedicated “to those for whom utopia is a rallying call.” While he demonstrates that his collection is filled with philosophies, theories, and narratives of freedom, joy, and love, he acknowledges that many other pages of the collection also embrace those “hard feelings” of sadness and sorrow. In this essay, I will analyze the possibilities that his ambivalent affective experiences throughout A History of My Brief Body offers for radical world re-/(kinship) making when read through Brendan Hokowhitu’s (Māori) Indigenous existentialism. I argue that Belcourt’s sadness and sorrow, not to be overdetermined as debilitating to his narratives of joy, love, and freedom, are integral aspects of his affective spectrum as he locates the immediacy of the present Indigenous condition through his own queer, Indigenous body. The intelligibility of Belcourt’s Indigenous immediacy through his ambivalent affective offers a linguistic shift away from a Hegelian dialectic of “resistance” to the settler-colonial state to one of loving “responsibility” to queer, Indigenous kin, conceivably to put us back into relation through Kim TallBear’s (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) notion of caretaking, which then makes Belcourt’s utopic “haven of a world” tenable to a broader audience
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