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Enabling and embedding creative participation in child and family social work
No full textWe all have a need to be seen and heard. For children who have experienced disruption, harm, danger or trauma, this need is crucial and it is the job of child and family social work professionals to ensure this happens. The ability to make connections and ‘move' with children (Ferguson, 2016; Winter et al., 2017) requires trusting relationships with reliable practitioners, particularly when they have the power to make decisions on a child’s behalf (Cossar et al., 2016). However, research identifies that:
> children can be unsure what is written in the plans designed to keep them safe
> participation is infrequently embedded into everyday social work practice
> the concept of wishes and feelings is often misunderstood.
(Dillon et al., 2016; Dillon, 2021)
Serious Case Reviews (now known as Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews) have consistently emphasised the missed opportunities of talking and listening to children in social work (for example, Laming, 2003; Rogers, 2013). Despite this, there remains an absence of practice guidance on ways to do this.
The need to develop effective communication skills to improve the quality of everyday interactions with children is an important component of professional education and practice (Lefevre, 2018; Ruch et al., 2019). Just as all children are unique, each relationship and interaction between a child and practitioner will be distinctive and influenced by the child’s individual experiences. This practice tool considers the degree to which children can actively take part in decision-making processes that affect their safety and security. It focuses on:
> keeping the child ‘visible’ (Ferguson, 2017)
> encouraging deeper collaborative and relational encounters with children
> providing examples of good practice, using a fictional and unfolding case study to explore how social workers can creatively facilitate children’s participation.Unfunde
Maternal obesity and metabolic (dysfunction) associated fatty liver disease in pregnancy: a comprehensive narrative review
Get PDF© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.Introduction: Obesity and metabolic-associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) during pregnancy constitute significant problems for routine antenatal care, with increasing prevalence globally. Similar to obesity, MAFLD is associated with a higher risk for maternal complications (e.g. pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes) and long-term adverse health outcomes for the offspring. However, MAFLD during pregnancy is often under-recognized, with limited management/treatment options.
Areas covered: PubMed/MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Scopus were searched based on a search strategy for obesity and/or MAFLD in pregnancy to identify relevant papers up to 2024. This review summarizes the pertinent evidence on the relationship between maternal obesity and MAFLD during pregnancy. Key mechanisms implicated in the underlying pathophysiology linking obesity and MAFLD during pregnancy (e.g. insulin resistance and dysregulated adipokine secretion) are highlighted. Moreover, a diagnostic approach for MAFLD diagnosis during pregnancy and its complications are presented. Finally, promising relevant areas for future research are covered.
Expert opinion: Research progress regarding maternal obesity, MAFLD, and their impact on maternal and fetal/offspring health is expected to improve the relevant diagnostic methods and lead to novel treatments. Thus, routine practice could apply more personalized management strategies, incorporating individualized algorithms with genetic and/or multi-biomarker profiling to guide prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment.Unfunde
The Influence of Ethnic and Prevailing Cultures on the Dietary Practices of Adult Immigrant Nigerians Living in the UK: A Phenomenological Study Using the Bourdiuesian Lens
No full textIntroduction: Morbidity and mortality from preventable diseases among ethnic minority groups, including the Nigerian community, are higher when compared with the white population group in the UK. Evidence suggests that diet is a major modifiable disease risk factor for many chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and dementia. Diet depends on several other factors, including culture, affordability, availability of food, particularly those commonly consumed by the community. Changes to diet (a process known as dietary acculturation) are reported to negatively impact the health of ethnic minority groups post-migration. However, published models of dietary acculturation only explain the changes and processes and not the underlying reasons for dietary change post-migration. Furthermore, understanding of the reasons for dietary change, the influence of culture, and other factors on the dietary practices and health of the Nigerian community and other ethnic minority populations in the UK is limited. This study explores the impact of dietary choices in the immigrant Nigerian community living in the UK, within the context of culture and other factors. Exploring the reasons for dietary change and the influence of culture using a sociological lens, namely Bourdieu’s theory of practice, is useful to better understand the development of health inequalities among ethnic communities. Methods: This thesis is situated within the interpretivism paradigm, driven by Heidegger’s phenomenological existentialism as a theoretical framework, with Bourdieu’s theory of practice used as the conceptual framework. iv Integrating existential phenomenology and Bourdieu’s theory enhanced the assumptions about the nature of existence or reality and helped to extend knowledge and understanding of the topic researched. Using a Hermeneutic phenomenological design, a qualitative research methodology that entails exploring individuals lived experiences, and with the aid of purposive sampling, community networks, and snowballing, were leveraged to assist in recruiting participants, based on socioeconomic factors, from the adult Nigerian population in Manchester and London. Using an informed consent process, seventeen one-to-one telephone semi-structured interviews were undertaken, enabling detailed information about culture, dietary choices, and finances to be collected. Audio-recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using Braun and Clark’s six-step guide reflexive thematic analysis approach, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice to guide and extend further the meaning of the data. Results: Viewing findings through the lens of Bourdieu's theory of practice, interactions between the concepts of habitus, field, and capital assist in explaining the retention of the Nigerian traditional dietary practice and the adoption of food regarded as unhealthy as a direct response to the increasing cost-of-living crisis. Other findings that were not the focus of the thesis were revealed. For example, most participants had limited knowledge of health-related diseases, healthy diets, and an understanding of health promotion resources. Furthermore, participants report what they now eat, and activities adopted to support eating in response to the increasing cost-of-living crisis. Conclusion: Dietary acculturation is inevitable among immigrant population. Embedding sociological theory in understanding diet related phenomenon is important to better understand health inequalities related to diet. Holding on to ethnic and cultural diets and the adoption of unhealthy dietary practices cause concern since energy-dense and nutrient-poor, low-quality diets are high-risk factors for chronic diseases. The need to develop culturally appropriate strategies to support healthy eating on a budget for this ethnic group is paramount to prevent poor health outcomes. Findings can be used for developing strategies and interventions aimed at reducing the widening ethnic health inequalities v concerning known diet-related disease risk factor
CPR Quality Officer role to improve CPR quality: A multi-centred international simulation randomised control trial
Get PDFBackground: An out-of-hospital cardiac arrest requires early recognition, prompt and quality clinical interventions, and coordination between different clinicians to improve outcomes. Clinical team leaders and clinical teams have high levels of cognitive burden. We aimed to investigate the effect of a dedicated Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) Quality Officer role on team performance.
Methods: This multi-centre randomised control trial used simulation in universities from the UK, Poland, and Norway. Student Paramedics participated in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest scenarios before randomisation to either traditional roles or assigning one member as the CPR Quality Officer. The quality of CPR was measured using QCPR® and Advanced Life Support (ALS) elements were evaluated.
Results: In total, 36 teams (108 individuals) participated. CPR quality from the first attempt (72.45%, 95% confidence interval [CI] 64.94 to 79.97) significantly increased after addition of the CPR Quality role (81.14%, 95% CI 74.20 to 88.07, p = 0.045). Improvement was not seen in the control group. The time to first defibrillation had no significant difference in the intervention group between the first attempt (53.77, 95% CI 36.57–70.98) and the second attempt (48.68, 95% CI 31.31–66.05, p = 0.84). The time to manage an obstructive airway in the intervention group showed significant difference (p = 0.006) in the first attempt (168.95, 95% CI 110.54–227.37) compared with the second attempt (136.95, 95% CI 87.03–186.88, p = 0.1).
Conclusion: A dedicated CPR Quality Officer in simulated scenarios improved the quality of CPR compressions without a negative impact on time to first defibrillation, managing the airway, or adherence to local ALS protocols
A critical autoethnographic study of the experience of the older secondary school teacher in England: a socio-political and emotional model of their Body without Organs
Get PDFThis research explores the lives of ‘older’ secondary teachers as they inhabit an educational landscape that has changed significantly during their careers. It employs a postmodern critical autoethnographic methodology as a vehicle through which to examine their experiences, as professionals who now exist in a neoliberal, marketised model of education, where they have been commodified. The work focuses on how their experiences of education have moulded their values and identities and provides empirical evidence showing that maintaining these fundamentals is challenged and compromised in the educational landscape that they work in. There are imperatives for this study. The UK population is ageing, and people will be forced to work for longer in the future. However, professional challenges that older teachers face are driving them out of the profession prematurely. This is at a time of crisis in education, where there is a failure to recruit and retain teachers, so arresting the exodus of older teachers would partly address the significant, long-standing recruitment issue. The evidence demonstrates that older teachers experience a loss of voice and agency. They are subjected to performative regimes, that measure that which is readily measurable, in an education system that has a functionalist agenda, with an economic purpose. This regime quells their creative desires and limits their opportunities to collaborate and to share their significant knowledge and experience. Older teachers are not afforded the same promotion and developmental opportunities as younger teachers and are subject to ageist stereotypical assumptions about their continued ability to function at a high level in teaching. This is despite their will to continue to develop and seek new opportunities. The evidence demonstrates that they do not feel professionally valued, despite the wealth of experience that they have to offer, and the research reveals their voices and the significant emotional impact of this on them. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2013a, b) and my empirical evidence, I construct a socio-political model of the older teachers’ “Body without Organs”. This Vitruvian Teacher model incorporates aspects of their professional lives that sustain them, together with those that significantly challenge them. The critical narrative that emanates from the research gives rise to suggestions for sustaining these teachers in fulfilling careers
Lossless Encoding of Time-Aggregated Neuromorphic Vision Sensor Data Based on Point-Cloud Compression
Get PDF© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Neuromorphic Vision Sensors (NVSs) are emerging sensors that acquire visual information asynchronously when changes occur in the scene. Their advantages versus synchronous capturing (frame-based video) include a low power consumption, a high dynamic range, an extremely high temporal resolution, and lower data rates. Although the acquisition strategy already results in much lower data rates than conventional video, NVS data can be further compressed. For this purpose, we recently proposed Time Aggregation-based Lossless Video Encoding for Neuromorphic Vision Sensor Data (TALVEN), consisting in the time aggregation of NVS events in the form of pixel-based event histograms, arrangement of the data in a specific format, and lossless compression inspired by video encoding. In this paper, we still leverage time aggregation but, rather than performing encoding inspired by frame-based video coding, we encode an appropriate representation of the time-aggregated data via point-cloud compression (similar to another one of our previous works, where time aggregation was not used). The proposed strategy, Time-Aggregated Lossless Encoding of Events based on Point-Cloud Compression (TALEN-PCC), outperforms the originally proposed TALVEN encoding strategy for the content in the considered dataset. The gain in terms of the compression ratio is the highest for low-event rate and low-complexity scenes, whereas the improvement is minimal for high-complexity and high-event rate scenes. According to experiments on outdoor and indoor spike event data, TALEN-PCC achieves higher compression gains for time aggregation intervals of more than 5 ms. However, the compression gains are lower when compared to state-of-the-art approaches for time aggregation intervals of less than 5 ms.Funder: EPSRC; Grant(s): EP/P022715/
Playing with Ekphrasis
No full textA second edition of the poetry that used ekphrasis as a method to investigate the tension between community and the individualThis book is not available on ChesterRepA second edition of the poetry that used ekphrasis as a method to investigate the tension between community and the individua
From a blank piece of paper to a compelling employability narrative: student-designed authentic assessment for creating socially responsible, employable graduates
No full text© Advance HE 2024Against a backdrop of increasing focus on graduate employability and employment outcomes (Bathmaker 2021) and increasing investment in widening participation programmes (Hutchinson, Reader and Akhal, 2020), this case study considers how handing over the reins and taking a student-led approach to module development has enabled students to develop a compelling employability narrative (Tomlinson, 2017; Tomlinson and Anderson, 2021), to better understand social responsibility and confidently articulate their skills for work
Children’s participation in research: tensions and dilemmas around ethical practice
Get PDFAre young children respected and cared for or overlooked by the practitioner or researcher’s personal goals in research? Are issues, related to ethics in relation to children’s consent and participation in research lost in translation especially in terms of expectations and interpretation in different cultural contexts. This paper explores the diverse perspectives of issues around ethics related to research with young children in early years settings.. It questions the perceived tensions around adults’ decisions about children’s participation in research. The issues related to children’s voice, gatekeepers of consent, participation, power and children’s rights will be discussed and the extent to which they influence the decisions which adults make about children’s participation in any research
Defining the most potent osteoinductive culture conditions for MC3T3-E1 cells reveals no implication of oxidative stress or energy metabolism
Get PDF© 2024 by the authors.The MC3T3-E1 preosteoblastic cell line is widely utilised as a reliable in vitro system to assess bone formation. However, the experimental growth conditions for these cells hugely diverge, and, particularly, the osteogenic medium (OSM)’s composition varies in research studies. Therefore, we aimed to define the ideal culture conditions for MC3T3-E1 subclone 4 cells with regard to their mineralization capacity and explore if oxidative stress or the cellular metabolism processes are implicated. Cells were treated with nine different combinations of long-lasting ascorbate (Asc) and β-glycerophosphate (βGP), and osteogenesis/calcification was evaluated at three different time-points by qPCR, Western blotting, and bone nodule staining. Key molecules of the oxidative and metabolic pathways were also assessed. It was found that sufficient mineral deposition was achieved only in the 150 μg.mL−1/2 mM Asc/βGP combination on day 21 in OSM, and this was supported by Runx2, Alpl, Bglap, and Col1a1 expression level increases. NOX2 and SOD2 as well as PGC1α and Tfam were also monitored as indicators of redox and metabolic processes, respectively, where no differences were observed. Elevation in OCN protein levels and ALP activity showed that mineralisation comes as a result of these differences. This work defines the most appropriate culture conditions for MC3T3-E1 cells and could be used by other research laboratories in this field.University of Chester QR Fund (grants QR 691 and QR 752
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