Investing in People

Foundations have long created programs to provide grants to individuals—most often in the form of fellowships, scholarships, and prizes. Several of these programs have become so prominent that they are now institutions in and of themselves. Consider just a few examples: the Pulitzer Prize, Fulbright Program, and MacArthur "genius" awards. Governments, as well as foundations large and small, fund individual support programs.The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has generously allowed the authors of this report to examine its portfolio of individual support programs to explore what the authors believe are some of the strategic fundamentals underlying this type of programming that could be applied to future individual support grantmaking. The purpose of this study is to inform those interested in individual support programs about not only some of the strategy considerations underlying this type of grantmaking but what these programs can be expected to achieve—and under what circumstances.

General practice palliative care: Patient and carer expectations, advance care plans and place of death-a systematic review

Background: With an increasing ageing population in most countries, the role of general practitioners (GPs) and general practice nurses (GPNs) in providing optimal end of life (EoL) care is increasingly important. Objective: To explore: (1) patient and carer expectations of the role of GPs and GPNs at EoL; (2) GPs’ and GPNs’ contribution to advance care planning (ACP) and (3) if primary care involvement allows people to die in the place of preference. Method: Systematic literature review. Data sources: Papers from 2000 to 2017 were sought from Medline, Psychinfo, Embase, Joanna Briggs Institute and Cochrane databases. Results: From 6209 journal articles, 51 papers were relevant. Patients and carers expect their GPs to be competent in all aspects of palliative care. They valued easy access to their GP, a multidisciplinary approach to care and well-coordinated and informed care. They also wanted their care team to communicate openly, honestly and empathically, particularly as the patient deteriorated. ACP and the involvement of GPs were important factors which contributed to patients being cared for and dying in their preferred place. There was no reference to GPNs in any paper identified. Conclusions: Patients and carers prefer a holistic approach to care. This review shows that GPs have an important role in ACP and that their involvement facilitates dying in the place of preference. Proactive identification of people approaching EoL is likely to improve all aspects of care, including planning and communicating about EoL. More work outlining the role of GPNs in end of life care is required

Detail-oriented cognitive style and social communicative deficits, within and beyond the autism spectrum: independent traits that grow into developmental interdependence

At the heart of debates over underlying causes of autism is the "Kanner hypothesis" that autistic deficits in social reciprocity, and a cognitive/perceptual 'style' favouring detail-oriented cognition, co-vary in autistic individuals. A separate line of work indicates these two domains are normally distributed throughout the population, with autism representing an extremity. This realisation brings the Kanner debate into the realm of normative co-variation, providing more ways to test the hypothesis, and insights into typical development; for instance, in the context of normative functioning, the Kanner hypothesis implies social costs to spatial/numerical prowess

Measuring the Impact of Youth Voluntary Service Programs

Summary and Conclusions of a meeting of international experts hosted by the World Bank and Innovations in Civic Participation to discuss evaluation of the impact of youth civic engagement on development

HCV epidemiology in high-risk groups and the risk of reinfection

Injecting risk behaviours among people who inject drugs (PWID) and high-risk sexual practices among men who have sex with men (MSM) are important routes of hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission. Current direct-acting antiviral treatment offers unique opportunities for reductions in HCV-related liver disease burden and epidemic control in high-risk groups, but these prospects could be counteracted by HCV reinfection due to on-going risk behaviours after successful treatment. Based on existing data from small and heterogeneous studies of interferon-based treatment, the incidence of reinfection after sustained virological response range from 2-6/100 person years among PWID to 10-15/100 person years among human immunodeficiency virus-infected MSM. These differences mainly reflect heterogeneity in study populations with regards to risk behaviours, but also reflect variations in study designs and applied virological methods. Increasing levels of reinfection are to be expected as we enter the interferon-free treatment era. Individual- and population-level efforts to address and prevent reinfection should therefore be undertaken when providing HCV care for people with on-going risk behaviour. Constructive strategies include acknowledgement, education and counselling, harm reduction optimization, scaled-up treatment including treatment of injecting networks, post-treatment screening, and rapid retreatment of reinfections

Análisis del consumidor en redes sociales y su percepción de las marcas

The use of social networks has proliferated in recent years. Although it is a very recent phenomenon, there are more and more types of networks used for different purposes. This is a review of the results of different researches carried out around this social phenomenon in Spain. To introduce the context this study retrieves a historical retrospective from the origins of social networks in the US at the end of the last century until today. The analysis begins with the results of the IAB Spain research “Situation on Social Networks 2019”. The main conclusions are compared with those obtained from the research on social networks carried out by Publicis Media to understand consumer habits in this environment “Discovering Social Networks: Map of Consumption and use in Spain 2019”. This followed by a comparative analysis of the results of both research, focusing on Social Network trends and an in-depth study on the most popular social platforms in Spain: Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter. Although social networks are perceived as platforms for young people, there is a very high consumption in the profiles called “perennials”, which respond to a behavioral or attitudinal profile rather than a sociodemographic one. To conclude this reflection there is a focus on advertising in Social Networks, analyzing the perception of users and the behavior of brands as recorded in the “VII Observatory of Brands in Social Networks” published in 2019 by IAB Spain.El uso de las redes sociales ha proliferado en los últimos años. Aunque es un fenómeno social muy reciente cada vez hay más tipologías de redes que se utilizan con distintos fines. En este trabajo se realiza una revisión de los resultados de varias investigaciones realizadas en torno a este fenómeno social y, en particular, su situación en España. Para situar el contexto se recoge una retrospectiva histórica desde sus orígenes en Estados Unidos a finales del siglo pasado hasta la actualidad. El estudio comienza por una referencia sectorial del “Estudio Anual sobre Redes Sociales 2019” realizado por IAB Spain. Estos resultados se comparan con los obtenidos de la investigación sobre redes sociales realizada por Publicis Media para entender los hábitos del consumidor en este entorno “Descubriendo las Redes Sociales: Mapa de Consumo y uso en España 2019”. Se valoran los resultados de ambas investigaciones y se analizan las tendencias en el uso de las Redes Sociales con un estudio en profundidad sobre las plataformas sociales de mayor uso en España: Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp y Twitter. Aunque las redes sociales se perciben como plataformas dirigidas jóvenes, se demostrará cómo hay un consumo muy elevado en los perfiles denominados perenials, que responden a un perfil comportamental o actitudinal más que sociodemográfico. Para finalizar este análisis, se realiza un foco sobre la publicidad en Redes Sociales, analizando la percepción de los usuarios y el comportamiento de las marcas según se recoge en el “VII Observatorio de las Marcas en Redes Sociales” publicado en 2019 por IAB Spain