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‘I’d love to come back, but it would have to be different’. Exploring former child protection social workers’ rationale for leaving the English child protection system, and the changes required to consider a return.
Get PDFEngland’s children’s social work workforce is in a state of crisis, characterised by record vacancy and agency rates. However, research exploring the factors underpinning this has focussed on current practitioners’ ‘intention to leave’ practice, and there has been a dearth of enquiry that has considered former practitioners’ reasons for leaving social work roles. This remains a critical omission when we consider that former workers provide unique root cause insight in a way that perhaps current workers are not able to. This study considers the experiences of 72 of England’s former child protection social workers through the lens of Job Embeddedness theory. Adopting an iterative mixed method design, the study considered participants’ reasons for leaving child protection work, and the circumstances that might convince them to return. Participants highlighted issues with salary, caseloads, bureaucracy, unpaid overtime and agile working arrangements as factors that had informed their decision to leave child protection. Implications include the need to reform local authority pay scales, prioritise time with children, offer paid overtime, and provide fixed office spaces to enhance the social, psychological and financial bond between workers and the child protection role – with associated positive implications for recruitment and retention within England’s child protection workforce
Sequential mixed methods study: exploring the adoption, implementation and evaluation of contact centre health initiatives.
Get PDFPurpose Contact centre advisors face significant health risks due to poor working conditions. Workplace health initiatives can improve advisor wellbeing, yet the factors influencing their adoption, implementation and evaluation remain underresearched. This two-phased mixed methods study explored UK contact centre health and wellbeing decision-makers’ perspectives on these processes. Methodology Phase one involved interviews with 11 decision-makers to explore factors influencing health initiative adoption and implementation and evaluation methods and outcomes considered important. Interviews were inductively coded using reflexive thematic analysis and mapped to behaviour change theory (COM-B and TDF). Phase two surveyed 38 decision-makers to assess consensus on phase one findings. Findings Key factors influencing adoption included leadership buy-in, listening to advisors, money and resource availability, and the perceived need to support employees. Effective implementation relied on manager and team leader buy-in, time for leaders to prioritise initiatives, experienced leadership, and adaptability to employee needs. Centres employed diverse evaluation methods and considered multiple outcomes. Originality These findings provide novel insights to guide the effective adoption, implementation and evaluation of workplace health initiatives in contact centres, ultimately supporting advisor wellbeing.<br/
Recommendations from the United Kingdom UNBIASED Study to Address Diabetes Technology Access Disparities for Children and Young People
Get PDFAIMS: The UNBIASED UK study is the first national study that explores disparities in access to diabetes technology among children and young people (CYP) with type 1 diabetes (T1D) from ethnic minority and low socioeconomic backgrounds in the United Kingdom. Despite the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidance ensuring free universal access to diabetes technologies since 2023, significant inequities persist. This article outlines key barriers and provides recommendations to improve equitable access and engagement with diabetes technologies for CYP.METHODS: A multimethod participatory approach was used, including semi-structured triad interviews with parents and CYP of underrepresented groups living in low socioeconomic areas and minority ethnic groups. Health care professionals from the National Health Service were also interviewed to explore perceived and systemic barriers to technology adoption. Thematic analysis identified key challenges and potential solutions, and new recommendations were sought from codesigned workshops and public consultations were further developed.RESULTS: The UNBIASED study identified key themes from parents, children, and young people, including barriers to access, experiences with diabetes technology, inconsistent services and education, intersectional challenges, communication issues, and emotional support needs. Health care professionals highlighted financial limits, language barriers, regional service differences, unconscious bias, and low awareness as major factors contributing to disparities. Key strategies and new recommendations are made to improve fair access to diabetes technologies, including systemic reforms, better communication and support, and stronger community engagement.CONCLUSIONS: This UK UNBIASED study highlights the urgent need for standardized policies, increased awareness campaigns, culturally tailored education, peer support initiatives, and improved health care provider training to ensure equitable access to diabetes technology for all CYP with T1D in the United Kingdom.</p
Cultivating Learning Cultures:Building Trust With Apprentices in a Swiss Telecommunications Company
Get PDFContext: In Switzerland, about two-thirds of young people start dual vocational education and training (VET) at around 15 years of age. Research shows that they are challenged in many ways during this phase of their lives and are therefore particularly vulnerable. Thus, supporting the transition of apprentices from school to the workplace environment requires careful attention. Trust is predicated upon the individual’s willingness to be vulnerable, and as such enterprises which offer VET to young learners must consider how they structure trust-building processes into their learning cultures.Method: A case study approach was adopted to investigate apprenticeship provision in the largest telecommunications company in Switzerland. Over the course of one year, 24 semi-structured interviews and observations were conducted with apprentices, coaches and man-agers. The qualitative data were processed through condensation, building categories and paraphrasing, by following Bohnsack's formulative interpretation method.Findings: The initial investigation of the learning culture within the company found that a cooperative culture of trust is crucial for educational success. In this context, the way rela-tionships were formed in the workplace was particularly significant. Expressed through constructive feedback and error culture, learners were supported to take risks and learn from their mistakes. Active participation was also highly valued, leading to a felt sense of recognition and belonging to the organisation.Conclusion: Trustful relationships within the apprenticeship proved to be a foundational conviction in the company, and while it must be noted that trust is not the sole predictor of success in VET, the learning culture facilitated by trust-building processes afforded oppor-tunities for apprentices to take ownership of their own learning, through negotiated out-comes; leading to creative autonomy and contributions that were to the benefit of the enter-prise
Increasing collaborative crafting: Leadership training and workspace design
Get PDFJob crafting is a tool used by employees in order to respond to and cope with implemented organizational change. This quasi-experimental study investigated the capacity of a leadership-level intervention to increase collaborative (team) job crafting within an organization that was attempting to mobilize employees and persuade them to embrace changes to their work design. Leaders attended a workshop that was designed to enhance their understanding of collaborative crafting and to facilitate discussion regarding their reactions and approaches to such behaviours. Over two measurement occasions, intervention teams split between teams whose members were collocated (n = 34) and teams whose members were dispersed (n=29) were compared to collocated control teams (n = 23). Multi-level analysis revealed a significant increase in the intervention teams’ collaborative crafting in comparison to the control teams. However, these effects were dependent on whether the team members were collocated. The findings advance job crafting literature by highlighting how leadership understanding of job crafting can directly influence the amount of collaborative crafting their teams exhibit. Secondly, the findings highlight how configurations of the physical workspace influence collaborative behaviours. Given the widespread adoption of new ways of working e.g. remote and hybrid models these findings provide timely insight
The evolving role of performance analysis in football:Integrating the observation of psychological behaviours
Get PDFDespite evidence that psychological factors are highly valued by thoseinvolved in player development and assessment, performance analysis(PA) in football remains largely confined to technical and tactical metrics.This conceptual paper argues for the integration of psychologicalbehaviour tagging within established PA processes. First, we reviewliterature demonstrating that psychological constructs such as resilienceand mental toughness can be operationalised through observableon-pitch actions. Next, we outline a framework for integrating PAmethods into the observation of psychological behaviours, including: 1.Agreeing on the psychological components of performance to betargeted; 2. Defining context-specific behavioural indicators of thesepsychological components through collaboration with multidisciplinarystaff; 3. Agreeing on any developmental or position-specific differences inthese behavioural indicators; 4. Building video-based tagging panels withexplicit definitions; 5. Training observers and establishing inter-observeragreement; and 6. Embedding behavioural data into individualdevelopment plans. We discuss key implementation challenges, includingrole delineation between analysts and psychologists, resource constraints,and the tension between short-term performance objectives and longtermpsychological development. By positioning analysis alongsidepsychology, the framework promotes a shared language and structurethat can encourage multidisciplinary input into the psychologicaldevelopment of football players. We conclude that video-based analysis of psychological behaviours represents a novel opportunity to advancedevelopment practices in football, but call for further applied research tovalidate observational analysis of psychological behaviours and assesslong-term developmental impact
The lasting impact of the pandemic on children and Child-first practice within a youth justice service
Get PDFThe pandemic shifted operational delivery across criminal justice services with greater use of remote delivery impacting upon relational practice. This research explored the lasting impact of the pandemic upon working practices, five years later, in a North-West youth justice service. The findings explore post-pandemic engagement within the youth justice service and reveal the lasting impacts of the pandemic in exacerbating vulnerability and mental health concerns of children
An AI ethics framework for a trustworthy autonomous drone system to support battlefield casualty triage
Get PDFAI-enabled capabilities in war provide new ethical challenges, even for nonlethal support tools such as the battlefield casualty triage drones that are the focus of this paper. We address an important and underexplored problem: how to embed ethical considerations into military AI systems that are designed to save lives rather than take them. The paper examines the ‘ATRACT’ project, which is developing an AI-powered drone as a trustworthy robotic autonomous system (RAS) to help frontline medics prioritise casualties in the critical post-trauma minutes that shape survival chances. As a position paper written while development is still underway, it includes the bespoke ethics framework created in the course of the project to date and offers real-time insights for other defence and security projects seeking to operationalise abstract AI ethics principles into concrete design and assurance guidance. We examine and draw upon approaches to operationalizing abstract principles in adjacent domains, to show how high-level principles can be translated into implementable requirements for technical robustness, ethical compliance, safety, and legal conformity, actively shaping system architecture, data, and human–machine interaction. We argue that trustworthiness is a socio-technical property that emerges from governance, documentation, and oversight rather than code alone, and that ethical assurance for triage drones must be designed in from inception and verified through ongoing testing, audit, and transparent evidence of due diligence
Unsupervised Disentanglement of Brain Heterogeneity for Identifying Subtypes of Alzheimer’s Disease
Get PDFNeuroanatomical heterogeneity in Alzheimer's disease (AD) hinders precision diagnosis and treatment, as distinct brain phenotypes may correspond to different disease subtypes. However, MRI-based subtype classifications are often confounded by co-occurring pathologies and non-AD factors, such as genetic predisposition and environmental influences, limiting their clinical interpretability. We propose 3D-DisAD, an unsupervised deep learning framework that disentangles AD-specific neuroanatomical variations from unrelated influences and clusters patients into subtypes with homogeneous brain phenotypes. The framework comprises two synergistic networks: (1) Contrastive Disentanglement Network, which separates AD-specific variations from those shared by AD patients and healthy controls; and (2) Transformation Generation Network, which refines these disease-specific variations by transforming healthy brain representations into realistic, pathology-consistent anatomies via diffusion-based generative modeling. Evaluated on four public datasets, 3D-DisAD reveals strong correlations between the disentangled AD-specific variations and diverse clinical and biological profiles, validating their relevance. Using these variations, we identify four AD subtypes with significant differences in biomarkers, cognitive trajectories, and genetic signatures, and uncover distinct longitudinal progression patterns that suggest potential windows for early intervention. By disentangling AD-specific variations, our method enables more precise patient stratification and personalized treatments, particularly in the early stage of AD. Code is available at: https://github.com/cnuzh/3D-DisAD