Intersecting Worlds: Promoting Affordable Care Act Enrollment Through Community Tax-Preparation Programs

This report tells how four tax-preparation programs are breaking the mold and tackling the world of health care enrollment. Readers will learn the challenges and opportunities associated with such a move, which has the potential to help millions of low-income Americans take a critical first step toward a healthier future

Evaluation of the Choose Life North Lanarkshire Awareness Programme: Final Report

The Centre for Men’s Health at Leeds Metropolitan University, with consultants from MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Glasgow, and Men’s Health Forum, Scotland (MHFS), were appointed to conduct the Choose Life (North Lanarkshire) evaluation, beginning in March 2011. The key evaluation questions are: 1. How has the social marketing approach to increase awareness of crisis service numbers and de-stigmatise understandings and attitudes about suicide worked? 2. Has the programme as implemented been effective? Which aspects of the programme have been particularly effective? 3. Has this programme been of benefit to the community, in particular young men aged 16-35? 4. What contribution has the community made to the effectiveness of the programme

Functional Skills Support Programme: Developing functional skills in geography

This booklet is part of "... a series of 11 booklets which helps schools to implement functional skills across the curriculum. The booklets illustrate how functional skills can be applied and developed in different subjects and contexts, supporting achievement at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4. Each booklet contains an introduction to functional skills for subject teachers, three practical planning examples with links to related websites and resources, a process for planning and a list of additional resources to support the teaching and learning of functional skills." - The National Strategies website

Philanthropy and Social Media

We define social media as online or digital technologies that serve to connect people, information and organisations through networks. The term evolved as a way to -distinguish the emerging online -information platforms from traditional "broadcast media" -- TV, radio, film, newspapers -- by highlighting that these new tools -were "socialised" and allowed the audiences to contribute to their content. Social media have therefore become defined in relation to these existing media channels, but in fact they have their ancestry in existing social technologies, like the telephone and the letter. If traditional media connect people to information, social media connect people to people

Tackling barriers to take-up of fuel poverty alleviation measures

Although there has been much work around the take-up of fuel poverty alleviation programmes carried out this has generally focussed on evidence from frontline managers and other stakeholders. Any investigation with end users has been minimal. Funded by Eaga Partnership Charitable Trust, Sustainable Cities Research Institute carried out a community-based investigation into barriers and possible solutions to the uptake of fuel poverty alleviation programmes. A combination of desk-based research with frontline staff and Participatory Appraisal (PA) techniques with communities were used to carry out this research. 362 people took part in the PA and 17 frontline staff returned detailed questionnaires. 4 areas were studied: 3 with poor and one with good take-up. Additionally vulnerable groups of consumers were identified; elderly, Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups and rural consumers. Each of the 3 areas with poor take-up has a good concentration of one of the identified vulnerable groups

Homogenization studies for optical sensors based on sculptured thin films

In this thesis we investigate theoretically various types of sculptured thin film (STF) envi�sioned as platforms for optical sensing. A STF consists of an array of parallel nanowires which can be grown on a substrate using vapour deposition techniques. Typically, each nanowire has a diameter in the range from ∼ 10−300 nm while the film thickness is . 1µm. Through careful control of the fabrication process, both the optical properties and the porosity of the STF can be tailored to order. These abilities make STFs promising for optical sensing applications, wherein it is envisaged that the material to be sensed infiltrates the void re�gion in between the parallel nanowires and hence changes the optical properties of the STF. Various homogenization formalisms can be used to estimate the constitutive parameters of the infiltrated STFs. In this thesis two different homogenization formalisms were used: the Bruggeman formalism (extended and non–extended versions) and the strong-permittivity�fluctuation theory (SPFT). These were used in investigations of the following optical–sensing scenarios: (i) Electromagnetic radiation emitted by a dipole source inside an infiltrated chiral STF. The effects of using the extended Bruggeman homogenization formalism, which takes into account the nonzero size of the component particles, were studied. (ii) Surface–plasmon– polariton waves on a metal–coated, infiltrated columnar thin film. The influences of using the extended SPFT formalism, which takes into account the nonzero size of the component particles and their statistical distributions, were explored. (iii) A metal-coated infiltrated chiral STF which supports both surface-plasmon-polariton waves and the circular Bragg phe�nomenon. The possibility of using in parallel both surface-plasmon-polariton waves and the circular Bragg phenomenon was investigated using the non–extended Bruggeman formalism. Our numerical studies revealed that the design performance parameters of the infiltrated STF are bode well for these optical–sensing scenarios. The use of inverse Bruggeman formalism was also investigated: this was found to be problematic in certain constitutive parameter regimes, but not those for optical–sensing scenarios considered in this thesis

Neighbourhood inequalities in the patterns of hospital admissions and their application to the targeting of health promotion campaigns

For many years indicators of deprivation have played a pivotal role in the processwhereby government assesses the relative level of resources require to meet local healthneeds. The formulae that have been developed for this purpose recognise that the locallevel of need for health resources varies among different population groups, such as theelderly or people with young children1. The formulae also recognise the strength of therelationship between health and deprivation. O ver a hundred years ago public healthofficials first recognised differences in the rates of mortality among different occupations.Likewise today?s funding formulae recognise the especial needs of local areas with highproportions of particular ly deprived groups such as overcrowded households, personswithout access to a car or people who are unemployed. As the focus of the health serviceincreasingly extends beyond the treatment of patients to an attempt to improve the healthof local populations through preventative campaigns, the focus of targeting extendslikewise to the identification of neighbourhoods at highest risk of particular diagnoses.To this end the National Health Service has recently commissioned a number of pilotexercises2 to assess the effectiveness of postcode classification systems in the targettingof health promotiona l material. In order to assess which types of neighbourhood are mostsuitable for specific communications programmes, the Hospital Episode Statistics haverecently been coded by Mosaic, the UK?s most widely used postcode classificationsystem. This paper summarises the key differences that have been found to exist betweenthese Mosaic types, both in terms of overall level of admissions and type of diagnosis.The paper also evaluates the extent to which the classification system may be an efficientmethod not just of targeting specific health campaigns but also for assessing levels ofneed by type of service at a highly local level