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Improving the experience of care home admission for family carers: the value and impact of care-embedded social work
No full textSummary
This article draws on a qualitative study in Wales. Semistructured interviews were undertaken with family carers (carers) of older people with dementia (n = 10), social workers (n = 8), team managers (n = 2) and care home managers (n = 5), to examine the impacts of care embedded social work upon carers, during the care home admission process for their relative. Thematic analysis of the data was informed by ethics of care theory and drew upon a grounded theory approach.
Findings
Care home admission constitutes a significant multidimensional transition in the lives of older people and their carers. It often has a profoundly negative impact on carers. This study identified that care-embedded social work: improves carers’ emotional well-being, reduces stress and anxiety, and resolves a range of practical and process-related issues. It is informed by the ethic of care approach and extends the capacity of social workers to offer a skilled, relational and rights-oriented service. Barriers to care-embedded social work include: shortness of time, work-related demands and managerialist conceptualizations of the social work role as short-term and task-focused.
Applications
This article makes the case for care embedded social work with carers during the process of care home admission. It not only identifies the benefits for carers but also for practitioners who regard it as positive and reflective of social work values. The findings promote the therapeutic and psychosocial potential of social workers and challenge the current narrow transactional model of social work involvement in admission
A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages
No full textIt is important to understand how persuasive the most-cited climate change messaging strategies are. In five replication studies, we found limited evidence of persuasive effects of three highly cited strategies (N = 3,216). We then conducted a registered report megastudy (N = 13,544) testing the effects of the 10 most-cited climate change messaging strategies on Americans’ pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. Six messages significantly affected multiple preregistered attitudes, with effects ranging from 1 to 4 percentage points. Persuasiveness varied little across party lines, inconsistent with theories predicting heterogeneous effects for targeted messages. No message increased pro-environmental donations, suggesting costly behaviours are difficult to influence with messaging alone. Inference of mechanisms driving effects was limited as the most impactful messages influenced multiple mediating variables. Taken together, these results identify several persuasive strategies, while also highlighting the limits of short-form messages for increasing Americans’ support for action to address climate change
Challenges in shared decision-making about major lower limb amputation: the PERCEIVE qualitative study
Full text linkObjectives Shared decision-making is widely advocated in policy and practice, but how it is to be applied in a high-stakes clinical decision such as major lower limb amputation due to chronic limb-threatening ischaemia or diabetic foot is unclear. The aim of this study was to explore the communication, consent, risk prediction and decision-making process in relation to major lower limb amputation.
Design A qualitative study (done as part of a broader mixed-methods study) using semi-structured interviews. Interview transcriptions were analysed using thematic analysis.
Setting Vascular centres in three large National Health Service hospitals in Wales and England, UK, between 1 October 2020 and 30 September 2022.
Participants A purposive sample of 18 patients for whom major lower limb amputation was considered as a treatment option/carried out, with interviews conducted before or within 4 months of amputation and 4–6 months after amputation. A further purposive sample of 20 healthcare professionals (including eight surgeons) involved in supporting or conducting major lower limb amputation decision-making.
Findings Five major categories were identified that highlighted the challenges of ensuring shared decision-making associated with major lower limb amputation: (i) patients’ limited understanding, (ii) variable patient attitudes to decision-making, (iii) healthcare professionals’ perceived challenges to sharing decision-making, (iv) surgeons’ paternalism and (v) patients’ and healthcare professionals’ decisional regret/possible consequences of challenges.
Conclusion Amputation is a life-changing decision for both patients and healthcare professionals, with huge consequences. Despite being considered the gold standard, our findings highlight several challenges to effective shared decision-making for major lower limb amputation. Shared decision-making training for healthcare professionals is paramount if these limitations are to be addressed and patients are to feel confident in being adequately informed about the treatment decisions that they make
MAUVE-MUSE: A Star-formation-driven outflow caught in the act of quenching the stripped virgo galaxy NGC 4064
Full text linkThe rapid quenching of satellite galaxies in dense environments is often attributed to environmental processes such as ram pressure stripping. However, stripping alone cannot fully account for the removal of dense, star-forming gas in many satellites, particularly in their inner regions. Recent models and indirect observations have suggested that star-formation-driven outflows may play a critical role in expelling this remaining gas, yet direct evidence for such feedback-driven quenching remains limited. Here we report the discovery of an ionized gas outflow in NGC 4064, a Virgo cluster satellite that has already lost most of its cold gas through environmental stripping. MUSE observations from the Multiphase Astrophysics to Unveil the Virgo Environment survey reveal a bipolar outflow driven by residual, centrally concentrated star formation in NGC 4064—despite its current star formation rate being ∼0.4 dex below the star-forming main sequence due to prior interaction with the cluster environment. The outflow’s mass loading factor is ∼2, suggesting that stellar feedback could remove the remaining gas on timescales shorter than those required for depletion by star formation alone. These results demonstrate that even modest but centrally concentrated star formation can drive efficient feedback in stripped satellites, accelerating quenching in the final stages of their evolution
Concrete in marine environments: Mechanisms and factors
No full textThis chapter describes state-of-art knowledge on mechanisms affecting the durability of concrete materials and structures exposed in marine environments. The mechanisms cover the main physical, chemical, electrochemical and biological processes. The environmental factors arise from the atmosphere and the seawater enveloping the concrete as well as possible flowing sediments or ice. The material factors pertain to the binder type, water-to-binder ratio and the aggregates as well as possible protection and self-healing. The loading and service factors comprise cracking induced by internal processes and loading. The factors affecting the performance of structural concrete in marine environment are the stability of the matrix governed by the microstructure and chemical composition, the mechanical properties, the transport properties including possible crack healing, and the electro-chemical states of the embedded steel bars
Introduction
No full textOur overall aim in this book is to explore what the concept of a specifically epistemic type of injustice has to offer socio-legal analysts, particularly in terms of rendering more central to discussions knowledges and experiences that may otherwise remain marginalised due to epistemic injustice. Our interest is in epistemic injustice and the spaces and places, including temporalities, in, through or across which law and legal and regulatory arrangements, and the knowledges, meanings and understandings they carry, play a co-constitutive role. Space is understood as social relations that put boundaries around, divide and connect things that are gradually imbued with meanings that provide them with stability over time. Through the accretion of meanings over time, space prefigures and shades into place. Place, then, is understood as varying permanences (and thus temporalities) of social relations within space through which people develop the meanings of law and legal and regulatory arrangements. While social relations, materiality and temporality are important across space and place, temporality appears to be even more important to the constitution of place than space. It is in relation to space, place and, especially, temporality——or simply space/place/time——that we believe this collection makes its most important contribution to analyses of space and place, and through them to epistemic injustice, at various scales. Our intuition is that the conditions for epistemic injustice may become even more durable in respect of place than space, given the centrality of temporality to the very transformation of former into the latter, thus making it harder to achieve epistemic justice
Noise-conditioned denoising autoencoder with temporal attention for bearing RUL prediction
Full text linkBearings are important elements of mechanical systems and the correct forecasting of their remaining useful life (RUL) is key to successful predictive maintenance. Nevertheless, noise interference during different operating conditions is also a significant problem in predicting their RUL. Existing denoising-based RUL prediction models often show degraded performance when exposed to heterogeneous and non-stationary noise, resulting in unstable feature extraction and reduced generalisation. To address the challenge of heterogeneous and non-stationary noise in bearing RUL prediction, this study proposes a hybrid framework that combines a noise-conditioned convolutional denoising autoencoder (NC-CDAE) and a temporal attention transformer (TAT). The NC-CDAE adaptively suppresses diverse noise types through conditional modulation, while the TAT captures long-term temporal dependencies to enhance degradation trend learning. This synergistic design improves both the noise robustness and temporal modelling capability of the system. To further validate the model under varying conditions, synthetic datasets with different noise intensities were generated using a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed NC-CDAE + TAT framework achieves lower and more stable errors than state-of-the-art methods, reducing RMSE by up to 23.6% and MAE by 18.2% on average and maintaining consistent performance (an RMSE between 0.155 and 0.194) across diverse conditions
The Drosophila Him gene is essential for adult muscle function and muscle stem cell maintenance
No full textMuscle stem cells (MuSCs), or “satellite cells,” are vital for vertebrate muscle growth, homeostasis, and repair. The discovery of analogous cells in Drosophila opens experimental opportunities in this genetically tractable model. Here, we show that the myogenic inhibitor gene Him, as well as being expressed in the myoblasts that form the flight and jump muscles, is expressed in flight muscle MuSCs. This makes Him only the second marker of these insect adult MuSCs. Furthermore, Him mutants exhibit disrupted jump muscle organization, impaired jumping ability, and a reduced pool of flight muscle myoblasts. In the flight muscles themselves, Him mutants show an age-dependent decrease in MuSC number, indicating Him is required for MuSC maintenance. This decrease coincides with reduced flight performance. Thus, Him is a new marker of Drosophila adult MuSCs and is the first gene shown to be required as flies age to maintain both MuSC number and flight ability
British Chinese culture and identity: From the postwar years to the early 2000s
No full textThis chapter looks at changes in the Chinese community, resulting from adaptations and reactions to living in Britain as an ethnic minority. It deals with two main issues: Chinese ethnic identity and its transformations, and the evolution of ethnic-Chinese culture. Its main focus is on the second generation