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Community readiness to address disparities in access to cancer, palliative and end-of-life care for ethnic minorities
Get PDFBackground Inequalities in cancer, palliative, and end-of-life care services remain a significant challenge, particularly for ethnic minorities who face systemic barriers such as limited awareness, cultural stigmas, and language differences. These disparities hinder equitable access to essential services and contribute to poorer health outcomes for affected communities. Addressing these challenges requires targeted, culturally sensitive initiatives that promote both awareness and uptake of care. Community readiness is a critical factor in the success of such interventions, as it reflects the willingness and capacity of a community to engage with and support change. Methods A mixed-methods approach was used, combining individual interviews and two focus groups with key informants (N = 14). This study, conducted in the ethnically and geographically diverse region of Bedfordshire, Luton, and Milton Keynes in southeast England, aimed to assess community readiness to embrace initiatives designed to reduce health inequalities in cancer, palliative, and end-of-life care. The key informants, including faith leaders and professional stakeholders, rated community readiness on five anchored scales: Knowledge of efforts, Leadership, Knowledge of the issue, Community Climate, and Resources. The focus groups facilitated a discussion of the ratings, providing deeper insights into community dynamics and barriers. Results Overall, the community was identified as being at the pre-planning stage of readiness to address disparities in cancer, palliative, and end-of-life care for ethnic minorities. Quantitatively, faith and religious leaders assessed readiness at the vague awareness stage (mean: 3.88), while professional stakeholders rated it at the pre-planning stage (mean: 4.87). Qualitative findings highlighted limited community knowledge, passive leadership with potential for ‘community champions’ to foster openness, a positive climate influenced by younger generations, widespread misconceptions, language barriers, and resource constraints affecting service accessibility. Conclusions The Community Readiness Model provides an insight into the community’s position regarding disparities in access to cancer, palliative and end-of-life services. In order to ensure that continuing efforts are successful in addressing existing inequalities rather than exacerbating them, this study emphasises how critical it is to evaluate the readiness of the community in order to avoid widening inequalities in access and use of services
Policing responses to child neglect: it’s not just about crime investigation
No full textChild neglect is a serious and pervasive form of child maltreatment with far-reaching developmental, health and social consequences for children across the life span. Whilst neglect may reach a criminal threshold, the nature of neglect often means it does not. Identifying and responding to neglect are especially difficult for police because of the complexities associated with it. This chapter addresses the knowledge officers need to discharge their duties relating to the criminal and safeguarding aspects of neglect (HM Government, 2023). The first half of the chapter defines neglect, framed by wider debates in research, policy and practice; highlighting the contested nature of the term. It also examines the evidence about neglected children, who neglects them, risk factors and indicators for neglect, and its impact. The second half examines practice challenges and approaches in identifying and responding to neglect, and, where it reaches criminal thresholds, investigating it. The terminology of ‘victimology’ and ‘perpetrators’ is generally avoided, to acknowledge criminal thresholds are not always met. Moreover, neglect is often determined by multiple risk factors and underlying systemic problems, such as inequality and poverty, which can make it difficult to disentangle parental or carer ‘intent’
Satellite image restoration via an adaptive QWNNM model
Get PDFDue to channel noise and random atmospheric turbulence, retrieved satellite images are always distorted and degraded and so require further restoration before use in various applications. The latest quaternion-based weighted nuclear norm minimization (QWNNM) model, which utilizes the idea of low-rank matrix approximation and the quaternion representation of multi-channel satellite images, can achieve image restoration and enhancement. However, the QWNNM model ignores the impact of noise on similarity measurement, lacks the utilization of residual image information, and fixes the number of iterations. In order to address these drawbacks, we propose three adaptive strategies: adaptive noise-resilient block matching, adaptive feedback of residual image, and adaptive iteration stopping criterion in a new adaptive QWNNM model. Both simulation experiments with known noise/blurring and real environment experiments with unknown noise/blurring demonstrated that the effectiveness of adaptive QWNNM models outperformed the original QWNNM model and other state-of-the-art satellite image restoration models in very different technique approaches
What next for desistance and youth justice?
Get PDFThe roots of this book lie in conversations about desistance and children in early 2021 that originated following an online event with academics, practitioners and policymakers who energetically critiqued and commented on the relevance and application of desistance theories to youth justice-involved children. While the purpose of the online event was to launch a briefing paper on desistance and youth justice, and thus mark the culmination of the National Association for Youth Justice’s (NAYJ) work on the topic, the discussions led to a number of reflections and questions. What helps children to move away from offending? To what extent is the concept and theorisation of desistance useful to explaining this during childhood and adolescence? Does the application of desistance theories risk problematising rather than normalising children’s behaviour? How is desistance thinking understood, interpreted and implemented in youth justice policy and practice
Desistance and children: setting the scene
Get PDFSince the late 1990s, ‘desistance’ – understanding how people move away from offending – has become a significant research focus and ‘increasingly ubiquitous’ in central policy (Maruna and Mann, 2019). Since 2014, with the introduction by the Youth Justice Board of a new assessment framework, desistance thinking has been progressively transplanted to youth justice in England and Wales from the adult justice system. Given that the desistance evidence base is primarily rooted in the experiences of adults who have a history of criminal behaviour, one might have expected this development to have been accompanied by some debate. Yet, discussion or examination of the relevance of desistance thinking to children in the justice system remains scarce, comprising a significant and important gap in scholarship. While there is a limited, albeit developing, international knowledge base about the desistance pathways of children, these studies have typically focused only on children defined as ‘serious’ or ‘persistent’ ‘offenders’. With desistance thinking increasingly applied across the spectrum of youth justice sanctions in England and Wales, it has become necessary to understand, and question, the relevance of desistance thinking with a much broader group of children. This is particularly pressing in light of the growing proportion of out-of-court disposals within youth justice caseloads, which comprise nearly half of supervision cases in some areas. And even among children on court-ordered community sentences, nearly 80 per cent now either have no or a minimal history of recorded offending (Youth Justice Board/MoJ, 2023). How might desistance theories apply given that most children’s offending ‘careers’ are limited to adolescence (Moffitt, 1993) and, thus, desistance is largely normative? Our starting point is that children’s distinct needs, by virtue of their young age and ongoing development, together with their typically normative offending, raise important questions about the relevance and meaning of desistance thinking to their pathways away from crime. In light of this, our core guiding questions are: * What helps children to move away from offending, and in what ways, if at all, does this vary by ethnicity, class and gender? * To what extent is the concept and theorisation of desistance helpful when applied to children or does it, alternatively problematise rather than normalise children’s behaviour? * How is desistance thinking currently understood and implemented in youth justice policy and practice? * What are the implications of the answers to these questions for youth justice theory, research, policy and practice? The collection has been initiated by the National Association for Youth Justice (NAYJ), the only individual charity which campaigns exclusively for the rights of, and justice for, children in trouble with the law. The NAYJ believes that children who come to the attention of criminal justice agencies should be viewed individually according to their stage of development and treated as a child first and foremost (National Association for Youth Justice, 2019). The editors of this collection are all members of the NAYJ’s Board of Trustees. Given that the charity is based in England and Wales, we have not attempted to give the book an international focus. However, it is likely that many of the chapters will be of international interest given that the role of desistance theory within youth justice is not restricted to a single jurisdiction. Given the focus of the NAYJ’s work, our philosophical position that children should be treated as distinct from adults, and the relative dearth of literature specific to desistance and children, the book deliberately, and unapologetically, restricts itself to discussion of individuals in conflict with the law who are under 18. In line with the ethos of the NAYJ, and international standards of children’s rights, we refer throughout to these individuals as children, and the terms ‘youth’, ‘juvenile’ and ‘young offender’ are deliberately eschewed
Results of measuring immersion in a cricket simulation game for improved VR with real-time time-of-flight performance capture
No full textThe research presented in this paper involves the design and implementation of a system that measured player responses in a virtual reality simulation game by including an innovative improved real-time animated avatar feature. The research was conducted on the notion that an avatar animated using real-time motion capture would enhance the player's immersion by increasing their sense of presence. When playing VR games that were commercially available, it was discovered that the user's avatar (Virtual agent) had a limited character and feature set, usually depending on the handset controllers provided with the base system. The inputs from these controllers were observed as inadequate to generate the entire body's animation. This research attempted to solve this problem by implementing full body marker-less motion capture for the improvisation of the user-avatar animation in real-time in a VR game. This was achieved by the implementation of Time-of-flight camera tracking to add positional data to the native PC-VR tracking. A Cricket batting simulation was developed to demonstrate the implementation of the combined tracking for immersive gameplay and replay experience. Hence, this enabled VR users and VR esports spectators to experience a better real-time animated Cricket action. Additionally, the research aimed to measure immersion by improving on the existing measuring techniques (Witmer and Singer, 1998), to measure the immersion by conducting experiments engaging humans to use the system [12]. The research's user-based studies involved collecting both qualitative and quantitative measures from 45 users in 2 phases of experimentation. This improved the immersion measurement by a novel rigorous analysis following Freeman's [14] and Scholerb's [15] method applied to a VR simulation and UI interactions. Data collection was verified by novel concurrency checks to eliminate unreliable user data by repeating and rephrasing the questions in multiple instances. The qualitative findings are briefly discussed in this article
Managing and implementing educational-technological change: a case for co-development
No full textI am the head of Digital Learning in the Academy for Learning and Teaching Excellence at the University of Bedfordshire. My team manage and support the university’s virtual learning environment - BREO (Bedfordshire Resources for Education Online) - and the systems associated with it which include Blackboard (the overall learning management system), Studiosity (a writing feedback service), Turnitin (similarity detection service) and Panopto (a video platform for recording content). My research interests include the narrative experiences of technology usage, examining students’ behaviours through data, linking narrative and data about students’ activities, and making sense of metrics
Strategic foresight and business analytics: a systematic exploration of mediated impacts on organisational resilience
No full textThis study delves into the interrelationships between business analytics (BA), strategic foresight (SF) and organisational resilience (OR) based on the systems theory. The research model was evaluated using Smart PLS 2.0. We found that both BA and SF have positive impacts on OR, explaining 32% of the change in OR. Additionally, BA was shown to have a positive effect on SF. We also discovered that BA partially mediates the relationship between SF and OR. However, no significant mediating effect was found in the relation of BA on OR through SF. These findings reveal the important role BA and SF play in enhancing OR, highlighting the mediating role of BA in the relationship between SF and OR. This research marks a significant advancement in the literature, being the first to establish this unique mediation effect and opens the way for future longitudinal research to validate and expand these findings
Organizational resilience:toward a universally accepted definition
No full textThis study delves into the intricate concept of ‘resilience,’ a term frequently used yet without a universally agreed-upon definition. Through a systematic methodology, it gathers and examines various definitions from academic sources, aligning them with key identified terms. A significant advancement of this research is the provision of a new, inclusive definition of resilience, distinguishing between ‘core’ and ‘augmentative’ resilience capabilities. This distinction creates a deeper understanding of both the fundamental aspects necessary for resilience and those that further strengthen it. Moving beyond traditional analytical approaches, this research has been externally recognized for its analytical depth. Consequently, the study makes a comprehensive and innovative contribution to the understanding of resilience, culminating in the proposal of a new, inclusive definition
CSR, governance and value
No full text* Describes a range of approaches to sustainability which have been adopted around the world * Presents an interdisciplinary global perspective on sustainability to offer new insights * Addresses a wide range of issues concerning sustainability at both a global and a more local leve
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