First insights into post-pandemic distress in a high secure hospital: Correlates among staff and patients

This preliminary study is designed to gauge the enduring psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on both patients and staff in a high secure settings. The study involved 31 patients and 34 staff from a high secure setting, who completed assessments to discern the link between COVID-19-related distress and various factors. These evaluations focused on coping strategies, resilience, emotional reactivity, ward atmosphere, and work-related aspects. Results indicated that 31.2% of staff met the clinical cut-off for potential PTSD due to COVID-19-related distress. Emotional reactivity, staff shortages, secondary traumatic stress, and coping strategies were positively correlated with distress, while resilience showed a negative association, suggesting a mitigating role. Notably, distress among patients was comparatively lower, with only 3.2% experiencing significant levels. The authors postulate that increased staff burdens during the pandemic may have led to long-term distress, while their efforts to maintain minimal service disruption potentially shielded patients from psychological impacts, possibly lead to staff 'problem-focused coping burnout'. This highlights the need for in-depth research on the enduring impacts of pandemics, focusing on mechanisms that intensify or alleviate distress. Future studies should focus on identifying effective coping strategies for crisis situations, such as staff shortages, and strategies for post-crisis staff support. Building on evidence of negative impacts on frontline workers and forensic inpatients during the pandemic, this study delved into the longer-term psychological repercussions that persisted post-pandemic. It sheds light on lasting distress levels and their correlates. These insights are crucial for formulating effective responses and strategies for future pandemics or analogous crises, highlighting the need for sustained support for staff grappling with long-term distress arising from such events

The Environmental and Economic Importance of Mixed and Boundary Friction

One route to reducing global CO2 emissions is to improve the energy efficiency of machines. Even small improvements in efficiency can be valuable, especially in cases where an efficiency improvement can be realized over many millions of newly produced machines. For example, conventional passenger car combustion engines are being downsized (and also downspeeded). Increasingly, they are running on lower viscosity engine lubricants (such as SAE 0W-20 or lower viscosity grades) and often also have stop-start systems fitted (to prevent engine idling when the vehicle is stopped). Some of these changes result in higher levels of mixed and boundary friction, and so accurate estimation of mixed/boundary friction losses is becoming of increased importance, both for estimating friction losses and wear volumes. Traditional approaches to estimating mixed/boundary friction, which employ real area of contact modelling, and assumptions such as elastic deformation of asperities, are widely used, but recent experimental data suggests that some of these approaches underestimate mixed/boundary friction losses. In this paper, a discussion of the issues involved in reliably estimating mixed/boundary friction losses in machine elements is undertaken, highlighting where the key uncertainties lie. Mixed/boundary lubrication losses in passenger car and heavy-duty internal combustion engines are then estimated and compared with published data, and a detailed description of how friction is related to fuel consumption in these vehicles, on standard fuel economy driving cycles, is given. Knowing the amount of fuel needed to overcome mixed/boundary friction in these vehicles enables reliable estimates to be made of both the financial costs of mixed/boundary lubrication for today’s vehicles, and their associated CO2 emissions, and annual estimates are reported to be approximately $290 billion dollars with CO2 emissions of 480 million tonnes. This paper is an expanded version of a conference paper [1] that was originally delivered at the LUBMAT 2023 International Conference which took place in Preston, UK, in July 2023

Vertical Strength Transfer Phenomenon Between Upper Body and Lower Body Exercise: Systematic Scoping Review

Background. There are myriad of exercise variations in which upper body (UB) and lower body (LB) exercises have been intermittently used. However, it is still unclear how training of one body region (e.g., LB) affects adaptations in distant body areas (e.g., UB), and how different UB and LB exercise configurations could help facilitate physiological adaptations of either region; both referred to in this review as vertical strength transfer (VST). Objective. To investigate the existence of the VST phenomenon as a response to various UB and LB exercise configurations and to identify potential mechanisms underpinning its occurrence. Methods. A systematic search using the PRISMA Scoping Review protocol was conducted in February 2024 using four databases (Web of Science, MEDLINE, Scopus and CINAHL) to identify peer-reviewed articles that investigated the VST phenomenon. Results. Of the 5,242 identified articles, 24 studies met the inclusion criteria. Findings suggest that the addition of UB strength training to LB endurance exercise may help preserve power-generating capacity for the leg muscle fibres. Furthermore, systemic endocrine responses to high-volume resistance exercise may beneficially modulate adaptations in precedingly or subsequently trained muscles from a different body region, augmenting their strength gains. Lastly, strength training for LB could result in improved strength of untrained UB, likely due to the increased central neural drive. Conclusion. VST existence is enabled by neuro-physiological mechanisms. Future research should involve athletic population, examining the potential of VST to facilitate athletic performance and preserve strength in injured extremities

Entrepreneurial Attributes: Accessing Your Inner Entrepreneur for Business and Beyond

Everybody wants their employer to recognise and value the skills and attributes they have, but not everybody feels those skills are valued. Entrepreneurial Attributes: Accessing Your Inner Entrepreneur for Business and Beyond looks at the link between skills, actions and attributes, and the value they present: value in terms of how an employee can be more valuable to the company they work for – in essence, more employable. The book aims to answer the question: why are entrepreneurial attributes we see in businesspeople valued, but in non-businesspeople they are sometimes not recognised when there is a clear link between entrepreneurial skills and attributes, human capital (effectively your CV) and how successfully a company performs? Entrepreneurial Attributes: Accessing Your Inner Entrepreneur for Business and Beyond discusses how we currently view skills, actions and attributes, and how those attributes add value to a person in life and to a business that person works for. The author questions whether certain skills and actions are unrecognised or neglected in today’s world, and uses case studies and research methodologies to illustrate how value can be recognised and appreciated within the context of human capital and firm performance. Finally, the book offers tools and strategies which may assist the reader in gaining a better understanding of the way in which their entrepreneurial actions and attributes can enhance their value as a person and also make them more employable. This book also offers businesses tools to better recognise and reward the skills it needs. The ideal audience for this book are those of us who wish to better evidence the skills and value we can offer a company; Entrepreneurial Attributes: Accessing Your Inner Entrepreneur for Business and Beyond will find an appreciative audience wherever there is a keen interest in the recognition and value of employee skills and attributes

The vulnerability of UK dentistry to dental tourists and dental tourism

A growing trend in dental health tourism reflects growing pressures on dental services and risks to the NHS

Supporting Mental Health and Well-Being of an Aging Prison Population Through Creative Nature-Based Interventions

This article focuses on an evaluation of a conservation and nature-based pilot project (BOOM) conduced in a UK local prison as part of the Greener on the Outside for Prisons therapeutic horticultural program. BOOM developed a tree and plant growing nursery where prisoners approaching the end of their sentences helped to restore endangered fauna and flora. They also engaged in tree-planting sessions within the prison grounds. Over 100 prisoners participated overall, with approximately a fifth of these going on to take part in an accredited course and engage in creative, arts-based activities related to nature as part of the project. Researchers carried out a series of focus groups with prisoners and staff who had taken part in prison-based BOOM activities during 2022–2023. In addition to BOOM staff, 18 prisoners were interviewed in four narrative-based focus groups, which gave participants a forum to discuss their experience of the project. A thematic analysis of this data has drawn out key themes in relation to health and well-being benefits of the project for an aging prison group and opportunities and challenges that arise from partnership working in this context. These health and well-being themes incorporate trust, connecting with nature, raising environmental consciousness, the value of creativity, and thinking beyond the gate. These findings have implications for future prison-based prisons project involving older prisoners, who are the fastest growing group in the prison population, and whose particular health and well-being needs are not currently entirely understood or met within the UK prison system

Dostoevsky in the Arts and Beyond: Contemporary Perspectives

The book is a substantial contribution to international Dostoevsky research, exploring Dostoevsky's contemporary relevance from a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective. It offers some fresh readings of Dostoevsky's texts, presenting new complex studies on the writer and his works in the mirror of several arts of the last three decades. The book is divided into three Parts, featuring researchers from Bulgaria, Great Britain, Russia and Ukraine. Part One deals with conceptual issues, treating Dostoevsky above all as a prophet and philosopher, and thus determines the ideological system of coordinates for the studies presented in the rest of the book. Part Two examines Dostoevsky's legacy through the lenses of literary theory, music, and Illustration art, and Part Three, via world cinema and theatre. The volume has gathered together an array of original and innovative studies from world leading experts in Dostoevsky's creative universe, to make an authoritative input into the field

A comparative Study of Automatic Facial Landmark Detection

Facial signs are associated with people’s health and general fitness. Among different facial signs, the facial landmark is one of the essential appearances of facial characters, which can be linked with people’s emotions, state of consciousness and health. Facial landmark detection can be used for recognising people’s expressions, monitoring the conscious status of people’s faces, or diagnosing neurological diseases. Recent advances in imaging technology and ever increasing computing power have opened up the possibility of automatic facial landmark analysis and assessment. Facial landmark detection algorithms play an important role in facial analysis tasks, such as expression recognition, face swapping and medical auxiliary diagnosis. As a result, the accuracy of the facial landmark localisation directly impacts the reliability of facial landmark based tasks . The purpose of this project is to conduct a comparative study of existing vision based methodologies for detecting facial landmarks and to identify appropriate ones that could overcome the challenges, such as pose variation and exaggerated expression. Three effective facial landmark detection methodologies were selected and implemented in this project, including Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) Cascade, Deep Alignment Network (DAN), and Stacked Dense U-nets (SDU). In order to provide a thorough evaluation, three publicly available datasets were used for the benchmarking, such as Multi PIE, 300W and Menpo, which contain a large number of facial images with the variations in illumination, pose and expression as well as the occlusion. Through the evaluation based on different datasets, SDU was considered to have the best performance and it was adopted and implemented into a real time facial analysis system that contains landmark detection and assessmen