Developing an accessible and useful wellbeing measurement tool for adults with learning disabilities

Background aims Standardised tools potentially provide a quick and reliable way for measuring wellbeing that can be used during monitoring and evaluation to understand how services are performing over time and in comparison to other services. This was a collaborative project between researchers from Leeds Beckett University, University of Liverpool, and Purple Patch Arts (a community organisation that work with adults with learning disabilities). The aim was to make a pre-existing wellbeing measurement tool more accessible for adults with learning disabilities and more useful for organisations working with adults with learning disabilities. Methods An existing standardised tool was adapted into a version that could be completed using a tablet. Adults with learning disabilities taking part in Purple Patch Arts’ sessions tested the new measure. We also asked staff at the activities what they thought about the new version. Results The accessible tablet version was found to be as reliable as two other existing standardised tools as a measure of wellbeing for adults with learning disabilities. Adults with learning disabilities and staff much preferred using the tablet version – it was more engaging, collaborative, and inclusive. However, the tablet version remained extremely resource intensive to use and relied on staff already having a relationship with adults with learning disabilities to help them complete it. Most adults with learning disabilities would still not be able to complete it independently in a service setting. Conclusion The new tablet version had strengths compared to existing wellbeing measures. However, at this stage it is not a replacement for more personalised approaches to understanding services users’ wellbeing. The accessible tablet version is a potential complementary data source in monitoring and evaluation, but more work is needed to understand its usefulness in different service settings and with more diverse groups of adults with learning disabilities

Highway to Hell or Stairway to Heaven: Making Sense of the Rock and Metal Scenes in Bradford and Leeds, West Yorkshire 1980-2005

Popular music scenes and spaces have been the subject of critical inquiry for many years, and metal music studies is also now well-established. In this paper, we explore the rock and metal scenes in Bradford and Leeds between 1980 and 2005 through written interviews with participants identified in the Facebook groups dedicated to the venues and nights in our chosen cities. We aim to show that the scenes constructed powerful senses of belonging to those in the scenes, but that memory and identity intersect with class, gender, race and northernness. This broad overview serves to contextualise our chosen cities, and we reference this snapshot of the scene in relation to other regions of the UK as we focus our attention specifically on the venues, fans, production, and consumption of music in Bradford and Leeds. In taking this approach, we aim to pinpoint aspects of localised fan experience, and we depart from the perspective of established theorists who have historically approached the topic of the scene from a predominantly US perspective

‘Are You Waste or Compost?’ Eco-coffins, Green Burial and the Frontiers of Neoliberalism

This article analyses innovative burial products linked to emergent modes of ‘eco’ death-styling. It focuses, specifically, on producers of sustainable coffins designed to prevent the environmental impacts of the dead and, instead, to make the corpse an agent of positive environmental renewal. Operating within the digital marketplace and presenting themselves as a green alternative to ‘industrial’ forms of bodily disposal, these producers offer novel funeral commodities to the ecologically responsible consumer contemplating death. We identify a tension, in the marketing discourses associated with these products, between a genuine concern with sustainability and complicity with a neoliberal ideology which sees ‘green consumerism’ and individualised ‘choices’ as the ‘solution’ to climate breakdown and ecological crisis. ‘Eco’ coffins provide, it is claimed, instruments for the management of post-mortem corporeality, extending neoliberal practices of biopolitical self-regulation into and after death. Similarly, the designers of these products position themselves as entrepreneurial agents disrupting the funeral market and transforming attitudes to death and our relation to nature. Although they offer a critique of the harms associated with the ‘conventional’ funeral industry, their ‘start-up’ ethos aligns them with the free-market orientation of Silicon Valley ideology. Although they effectively merge aesthetic appeal, innovative design and sustainability, eco coffins are commodities, proffered to ‘eco-sensitive’ consumers in the Global North, their production and circulation evidence of how ‘capitalism extracts value from domains that were previously not perceived as elements of the sphere of economic activity – social interactions, the body, life… from death and the dead.

An effective application for tackling patient depression

This paper is a result of a working group at the 3rd Workshop on Emotion in HCI. The aim of this working group was to sketch an affective system for the support of depressed people living mainly on their own. In this paper we present some results of this wok, focusing on how acquired emotion information could be processed and provided to the stakeholders, and how the system could respond to sensed changes in the emotional state of a patient

Opportunities and costs for shared ground loops

Shared ground loops (SGLs) combine shared ground heat exchangers with distributed heat pumps across multiple properties and may offer a route to decarbonise heating where individual heat pumps or heat networks are not feasible. SGLs can be installed in homes and buildings with limited outside space for a heat pump or insufficient demand density to support a heat network. To make the most of potential opportunities, greater awareness of factors shaping UK deployment is needed. Through a mixed-methods approach combining rapid evidence assessment, case studies and policy mapping, this study finds SGLs mostly limited to deployment by social landlords and in new build settings, with wider use impacted by high capital costs, policy gaps around mid-scale solutions, market concentration around a single supplier, and the need for business models applicable to mixed-tenure settings. SGLs are particularly suitable for dwellings in higher density areas outside of government-designated Heat Network Zones, where it is expected that large heat networks will deliver the lowest-cost route to decarbonising heat. We suggest policy and practice recommendations intended to create conditions for wider deployment. At a national policymaker level, SGL suitability for mid-scale, medium-density settings and support for a flexible energy system should be more clearly recognised, especially in areas outside Heat Network Zones. At the individual company level, deployment would be supported through development of utility-style business models and installation approaches by infrastructure developers which can offer SGLs to households of a range of tenure types

'Uncovering Students’ Powerful Persistent Passion: Implications for Policy and Practice in Widening Access and Success in Healthcare Education'

As nursing continues to advance health care in the 21st century, the present change in demographics, tied with the ongoing disparities in health care and health outcomes, will warrant our enduring attention and action. This paper argues that increasing the diversity of the workforce in professional healthcare roles is necessary to meet the demand for nurses, midwives and other health professionals. This drive includes recruiting and retaining a culturally diverse workforce that mirrors the United Kingdom’s change in demographics and to reduce health disparities. Our qualitative study in England recruited, trained and supported ten student-peer-researchers, who explored the experiences of 70 ‘non-traditional’ students and recent graduates in National Health Service (NHS)-funded higher education programmes. A key theme of the majority of participants was a powerful persistent passion to be healthcare professionals, which offered them resilience in addressing and overcoming the entry hurdles, sustained them through the many barriers and challenges they experienced on their journey to becoming qualified, and ultimately delivered diversity to the NHS. This is in contrast to the way in which widening participation in healthcare education is discussed in the literature, where the focus is on what students’ lack (awareness, information and academic credentials); the dominant discourse is of student deficit, rather than strength. This paper explores how students’ ‘powerful persistent passion’ can be recognised, validated and nurtured – rather than ignored, exploited and eroded – to facilitate widening access and improving retention and success in higher education, by higher education and healthcare providers working closely together

Optimising Physical Education: The Application of OPTIMAL Theory in Practice

The development of motor competence is critical for a child’s holistic development and engagement in physical activity across the lifespan. As physical education becomes more marginalised in school settings, efforts are needed to enhance the quality of movement skill learning environments. One such approach is through the optimisation of task design, instruction and feedback which engages learners in key attentional (external focus of attention) and motivational (enhanced expectancies and autonomy support) processes. This paper aims to provide practical examples of how these key attentional and motivational factors can be applied by teachers in physical education lessons to optimise the learning of motor skills and motivation to create a physically literate learner

Investigating retail space performance through spatial configuration of consumer movement: A Comparison of York and Leeds

Spatial layouts help to shape retail consumer movement, which in turn plays a role in determining the distribution of retailers and performance of retail space on city network. Spatial configuration can be understood through street segment analysis, computing to-movement (integration) and through-movement (choice) metrics within a given set of connecting street networks, making it possible to assign syntactic values to individual street segments (space). In this paper, such syntactic values for the cities of Leeds and York have been established to indicate a spatial accessibility index that can be used to understand potential human (consumer) movement on spatial layouts. Other studies have established relationships between computed syntactic values and ranges of socio-economic activities, including land uses and urban value distributions. However, little is known about how configured (movement) metric outputs relate to changes in retail space’s rental values (as proxy for retail space performance) across different city network scales. In response, this study investigates the relationship between retail space performance and consumer movement patterns (CMP) within sampled spatial layouts. The CMP are defined as spatial configuration metric outputs of integration, choice and normalised angular choice (NACH) metrics, computed at macro (city) and meso (city centre) scales. Street segment analysis on spatial layouts at city (macro) and city-centre (meso) scales were computed using DepthMapX tool to obtain the CMP variables. The computed syntactic values of CMP variables were then exported as point features into QGIS for analysis with the retail space performance within the sampled spatial layouts. Rental value data for years 2010 and 2017 were obtained from the Valuation Office Agency VOA datasets for York and Leeds. The two datasets were linked through a common key variable (Unique Address Reference Number) to compute rental value changes using MS Access and MS Excel tools. The rental value change table was also exported as point features into QGIS for geospatial analysis with the computed syntactic values of CMP variables. To achieve this, the study utilises vector grid (developed at 500m X 500m at city scale, and 200m X 200m at city centre scale for both cities) to a create uniform platform for all variables per grid. The relationship outputs between variables were investigated at macro city scale and meso city-centre scale for the two cities. The study reveals that there are variations in relationships between retail space performance and computed movement syntax across different scales of spatial layouts. The variables exhibit significant positive relationships at mesoscale (city centre), while variables exhibit weak correlation at the macroscale (city) for both cities. It further reveals that the integration (to-movement) metric has the most significant impact on retail space performance, with the through-movement metric having the least impact across all spatial layouts. On this basis, the study conclude that integration metric has the capability of signalling future of retail space (rental value) performance at city mesoscale layouts

Teoria de Complejidad y Cibernetica organizacional: Aplicaciones y perspectivas de uso en el campo de seguridad y manejo de riesgo

1- Conceptos generales - Sistemas y Pensamiento de sistemas - Complejidad – Problemas complejos - Caja de herramientas: SD; SNA, Cibernetica Organizacional 2- Ejemplos de aplicacion - VSM y disenno de sistemas de defensa - VSM y Sistemas de Defensa Total - VSM y gestion de riesgo (desastres) - VSM ofensiva - DS y seguridad y toma de decisiones (Sensitivity Analysis / Malik) 3- Nuevos proyectos - VSM y sistemas dinamicos - VSM y Analisis Avanzado de Redes Sociale