Effective child protection practice in England: legislation, barriers and strategies

This CPD article aims to increase nurses’ awareness of their safeguarding responsibilities and to provide them with a general overview of the basic knowledge and skills needed for individualised, child-centred, and effective child protection/safeguarding practice. Specifically, the article explores the lessons that can be learned from 50 years of child death tragedies in England; the key child protection legislation that nurses should know about when undertaking work with children; the ‘usual’ barriers and challenges to maintaining child-centred safeguarding practice; and the strategies that can be employed to overcome these barriers

Monitoring of the resin flow front within a resin transfer moulding during fabrication using fibre Bragg gratings

Composite structures are becoming significantly larger. Discarding these large structures due to manufacturing defects is unacceptable due to cost, time, and environmental concerns. To mitigate the risk of defects, real-time monitoring of resin flow during infusion is needed to ensure complete wetting of glass mats. However, current studies lack real-time flow-front monitoring, relying instead on manual post-production checks, and may result in costly repairs or disposal of defective parts. Fibre Bragg grating sensors have been shown to spectrally respond to resin during infusion, but the physical mechanism behind this response—crucial for interpreting flow front location and direction—has not been investigated. For the first time we report an in-depth study of fibre Bragg grating sensors for real-time monitoring of the flow front of liquids in the resin transfer moulding (RTM) infusion process and the mechanisms that produce the spectral response based upon the viscous force generated by the liquid and its flow-front. We present experimental wavelength shift data of the fibre Bragg grating sensors during infusion to show that viscous force is the dominant mechanism. Furthermore, we created a model that shows good agreement with experimental data, the model predicts wavelength shifts of the sensors at different locations to the approaching flow-front. Current model can aid numerical simulations of the infusion process to ensure complete impregnation of glass reinforcement mats

Equity in doctoral education:policy or action?

This chapter presents four distinctive perspectives to scrutinise the realisation (or lack thereof) of equity in doctoral education. At a personal level, the reflections presented here explore individual experiences of (in)equity, emphasising how personal biases and subjective experience influence one’s engagement with equity issues. At the institutional level, the chapter investigates how organisational structures and policies either facilitate or hinder equity. The authors also seek to examine the role of political leverage in shaping equity agendas, scrutinising how political dynamics and power structures affect the prioritisation and implementation of equity in doctoral education. While acknowledging instances of excellent equitable practices across many higher education institutions, the purpose of this chapter is to spotlight areas where these practices are absent but have potential for implementation.</p

Recorded Stand-Up from Radio to Netflix

While stand-up comedy is conventionally thought of in terms of liveness and live performance, it is also the case that recorded media – such as radio and television – have a long, intertwined relationship with stand-up. Beginning from a historical perspective, this chapter outlines how recorded comedy media drew on live forms from its inception, taking inspiration from music hall and vaudeville. Recorded stand-up remains a fundamental component of contemporary recorded media, via stand-up specials on platforms such as HBO and Netflix. But the grammar of recorded media offers challenges to the pleasures associated with stand-up – especially in terms of liveness – and this chapter therefore explores the particularities of stand-up on radio and television, and its ongoing relationship to the live forms that predated it and continue alongside it

Reimagining the role of children and young people's voices within the design of inclusive education

This chapter details an ongoing project that has been designed to involve children and young people in creating visual and tactile materials for a school resource toolkit which can be utilised to express how they feel about key issues within their education. The aim of developing the toolkit is so teachers and other education professionals can elicit and respond appropriately to the views and experiences of the children and young people they work with and support.This chapter provides a case study describing the work of the ‘Visualising Opportunities: Inclusion for Children, Education, and Society’ (@VOICES_Ed) project. In this project, children and young people created ‘artified’, annotated photographs, scenarios, and other materials to facilitate the sharing of their views and experiences regarding inclusion and/or marginalisation. These materials have now been used as prompts for discussing issues relating to inclusive education with other children and young people, and with teachers, teaching assistants, and other professionals working with them.In this chapter, we describe the range of multisensory strategies which have been developed and used and provide examples of the materials created by children and young people. We discuss what we have learnt from the project and offer suggestions on revisiting how children and young people can be central to developing more inclusive approaches, policies, and environments. In doing so, we offer alternative ways to facilitate listening to children and young people’s voices to enhance reflections on inclusion and marginalisation within education and society

Roundtable: Rod Kedward and his legacy

'Rod Kedward and his legacy' is a French History roundtable edited by Daniel A.Gordon, celebrating the life and work of Rod Kedward. Professor Harry Roderick Kedward (1937–2023), universally known as Rod Kedward, is best known for his groundbreaking studies of the French Resistance, discussed in diverse ways by several contributors to this roundtable. The roundtable contributions by Daniel A. Gordon, Sian Reynolds, Martin Evans, Hanna Diamond, Alya Aglan, Paula Schwartz and Chris Warne examine Rod's life and work, from his life as a soixante-huitard, via his ground-breaking works on the French Resistance, his international influence and mentorship, to the Archive of Resistance Testimony. Daniel A. Gordon's contribution, 'Introduction: Rod Kedward, soixante-huitard' (pp. 1-6) argues that Rod’s interests extended in time and space well beyond the Second World War. Indeed, to fully comprehend Rod, it is important to understand him as a soixante-huitard—close witness to many of the upheavals that marked the landscapes of les années ’68, from the Larzac Plateau to the South Downs.<br/

Recent Advancements in Fused Deposition Modeling

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a continuously growing field composed of numerous part‐building approaches that involve the creation of products in a layer‐by‐layer fashion. Fused deposition modeling (FDM) is a three‐dimensional printing or AM technique that is being adopted on an industrial scale and is being utilized to make parts for commercial use mainly in the medical sector these days. It has become the need of the hour to study the printing parameters of FDM to understand the print behavior and optimize process parameters to make parts with better mechanical properties. This review paper provides an understanding of development in the optimization of process parameters for various print materials like Nylon, polylactic acid (PLA), acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), and polyether ether ketone (PEEK) by utilizing the different designs of optimization techniques like Taguchi and response surface methodology. Regarding relevant mechanical properties, the influence of process parameters like layer thickness, raster angle, build orientations, raster width, and infill density are underlined carefully. The paper also concludes the optimized parameters to obtain the best mechanical properties such as tensile and flexural strength of Nylon, PLA, PEEK, and ABS. It also provides literature with up‐to‐date references and highlights future recommendations to optimize the mechanical properties of FDM fabricated components

Uncertainty Driven Sampling to Handle Intra-class Imbalance Part Segmentation in Wheat

We introduce a novel method to address intra-class imbalance in 3D point cloud segmentation of wheat, focusing on distinguishing between ear and non-ear parts. Variability in plant structure, influenced by factors such as curvature and shape, often leads to data imbalance which complicates segmentation tasks. Our approach utilizes Monte Carlo Dropout to identify and prioritize uncertain samples at the end of each training epoch, employing uncertainty-driven sampling to select samples with the lowest confidence. These samples undergo augmentation through scaling and leaf crossover techniques, enhancing their representation in the training set. Our comparative evaluations demonstrate that this strategy significantly improves the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) and segmentation accuracy, thereby increasing model robustness for complex 3D plant structures

Shining a light in COVID-19 darkness: the impact of hospital chaplaincy teams on health care professionals

Introduction: A COVID-19 global pandemic, declared in March 2020 by the World Health Organisation, resulted in travel restrictions, closure of non-essential shops and services, and discontinuation of elective health care. Escalation of the pandemic impacted on hospital healthcare professionals who experienced deaths of colleagues, and unprecedented changes in working conditions. One area that received media attention in the UK, during the pandemic, was the role of the Hospital Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care Teams. Methods: An exploratory study was advertised via social media, the press and professional bodies resulted in 86 healthcare professionals and 63 chaplains, who had worked clinically, in the UK, during the pandemic, completing an open free text electronic survey. Seven chaplains participated in a follow up telephone interview, with all data collected in 2022. Results: Survey demographic data were analysed using descriptive statistics. Free text responses and interviews were subject to thematic analysis. The focus on support of health professionals was widely reported by all respondents. Two overarching themes were identified: [1] Organisational initiatives with sub themes of structural and virtual support and [2] Proactive –‘going to the front line’, with sub themes of: emotional and spiritual support, moral support, and practical inputDiscussion/Conclusion: The overarching finding was that hospital chaplains were alongside staff on the clinical frontline. Staff described this as invaluable in the immediacy of support and providing a valued presence. The chaplain’s role changed to becoming more focused on staff support, which appears to be ongoing, thus impacting on the future role and training for hospital chaplaincy teams.<br/

Enhancing emergency front-of-neck airway training: a mixed methods study on the impact of external noise and startle stressors:Stress and Startle

Introduction: Our aim was to investigate whether emergency front-of-neck airway training utilising low-fidelity manikins in a ‘tea-trolley’ format could be improved by the incorporation of stress inoculation training. This would be an important advance as clinicians report that cognitive overload impairs performance during real emergencies. We hypothesised that environmental noise and simulated blood splatter would result in a heightened stress experience. Methods: Thirteen anaesthetic residents completed the study, performing emergency front-of-neck access first under non-stressed conditions and later with the addition of noise and startle stressors. The primary outcome was a change in salivary cortisol, measured before and after each training session. Secondary outcomes included participant proficiency; time to perform the procedure; and perceived stress and utility of the training. Semi-structured interviews explored participant perceptions of the training. Results: Environmental noise and simulated blood splatter resulted in a quantitatively and qualitatively heightened stressful experience for the participants in paired comparisons. There was no significant change in median (IQR [range]) salivary cortisol levels after participants completed the non-stressed training: 6.4 (4.3–8.1 [3.3–16.2]) nmol.l -1 vs. 9.2 (5.8–11.3 [3.8–14.1]) nmol.l -1, respectively (p = 0.133). There were, however, significant changes following stressed training: 4.9 (4.3–11.6 [1.1–11.6]) mol.l -1 vs. 9.2 (8.0–12.1 [4.4–20.1]) nmol.l -1, respectively (p = 0.005). Participants' semi-structured interviews and questionnaire results evidenced that the adaptations created a more stressful yet valuable training experience. Discussion: Environmental noise and simulated blood splatter increased participant stress. Participants performed emergency front-of-neck access equally well in both sessions, suggesting this technical skill is stored in their stress-resistant long-term memory. These relatively low-cost adaptations could enhance emergency front-of-neck airway tea-trolley training by facilitating stress inoculation training and so better prepare clinicians for real-world emergencies.</p