Investments in Illinois' Future: A 10-year Analysis of State Funding for Youth Ages 12 to 24

Supporting youth during their transition from childhood to adulthood is a critical investment in our collective future. Public spending on programs and services for youth is an important indicator of the degree to which our society prioritizes this important responsibility. Between 1990 and 2000, the population of 6 to 18 year olds, those who are now between the ages of 12 to 24, increased 12.8%. Investments in Illinois' Future analyzes Illinois expenditures on programs and services for youth ages 12 to 24 between fiscal years 1994 and 2004. This historical analysis yielded the following key findings that provide valuable information and context to inform future planning, policy development, appropriations decisions, and statewide analysis impacting youth in Illinois

Narrowing the achievement gap : what and how schools learn through involvement in the specialist schools achievement programme – Part 1

This report was commissioned by the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) to find out how schools used the Specialist Schools Achievement Programme (SSAP) to narrow the gap between the academic attainment and wider achievements of students from disadvantaged and more advantaged backgrounds. The study was undertaken by gathering short case studies from 70 schools participating in the programme and identifying 6 schools that had made notable progress for in-depth case study

Evaluation of A Service Transformation by Cambridgeshire County Council Children’s Services

Headlines from the Evaluation: The overall opinions of all participant groups were that the SWWFF transformation has benefitted client families and staff. Questionnaire data from staff suggested that they overwhelmingly prefer the new model. In particular, the unit structure helps staff feel more supported and may lead to better practice as more ideas are available to help develop the intervention with each family. The systemic training has led to improved quality of social work practice. Communication with service users and other agencies is improved

Independent assessment of improvements in dementia care and support since 2009

The Department of Health commissioned a team from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to consider progress in dementia care since 2009. We were asked to focus particularly on three areas: improvements in diagnosis and post-diagnostic support, changes in public attitudes, and developments in research. Two major policy documents provide the context: the National Dementia Strategy 2009, which is now finished, and the Prime Minister’s Challenge on Dementia 2012, which superseded it

Measuring and optimising the efficiency of community hospital inpatient care for older people: the MoCHA mixed-methods study

Background: Community hospitals are small hospitals providing local inpatient and outpatient services. National surveys report that inpatient rehabilitation for older people is a core function but there are large differences in key performance measures. We have investigated these variations in community hospital ward performance. Objectives: (1) To measure the relative performance of community hospital wards (studies 1 and 2); (2) to identify characteristics of community hospital wards that optimise performance (studies 1 and 3); (3) to develop a web-based interactive toolkit that supports operational changes to optimise ward performance (study 4); (4) to investigate the impact of community hospital wards on secondary care use (study 5); and (5) to investigate associations between short-term community (intermediate care) services and secondary care utilisation (study 5). Methods: Study 1 – we used national data to conduct econometric estimations using stochastic frontier analysis in which a cost function was modelled using significant predictors of community hospital ward costs. Study 2 – a national postal survey was developed to collect data from a larger sample of community hospitals. Study 3 – three ethnographic case studies were performed to provide insight into less tangible aspects of community hospital ward care. Study 4 – a web-based interactive toolkit was developed by integrating the econometrics (study 1) and case study (study 3) findings. Study 5 – regression analyses were conducted using data from the Atlas of Variation Map 61 (rate of emergency admissions to hospital for people aged ≥ 75 years with a length of stay of < 24 hours) and the National Audit of Intermediate Care. Results: Community hospital ward efficiency is comparable with the NHS acute hospital sector (mean cost efficiency 0.83, range 0.72–0.92). The rank order of community hospital ward efficiencies was distinguished to facilitate learning across the sector. On average, if all community hospital wards were operating in line with the highest cost efficiency, savings of 17% (or £47M per year) could be achieved (price year 2013/14) for our sample of 101 wards. Significant economies of scale were found: a 1% rise in output was associated with an average 0.85% increase in costs. We were unable to obtain a larger community hospital sample because of the low response rate to our national survey. The case studies identified how rehabilitation was delivered through collaborative, interdisciplinary working; interprofessional communication; and meaningful patient and family engagement. We also developed insight into patients’ recovery trajectories and care transitions. The web-based interactive toolkit was established [http://mocha. nhsbenchmarking.nhs.uk/ (accessed 9 September 2019)]. The crisis response team type of intermediate care, but not community hospitals, had a statistically significant negative association with emergency admissions. Limitations: The econometric analyses were based on cross-sectional data and were also limited by missing data. The low response rate to our national survey means that we cannot extrapolate reliably from our community hospital sample. Conclusions: The results suggest that significant community hospital ward savings may be realised by improving modifiable performance factors that might be augmented further by economies of scale. Future work: How less efficient hospitals might reduce costs and sustain quality requires further research

The exposure to verbal abuse of student nurses gaining placement experience

Clinical placement experience has a key role to play in the socialisation and preparation of future members of the nursing profession. Aggression experienced by healthcare workers is currently receiving considerable attention and student nurses have been identified as a group vulnerable to experiencing workplace abuse (Little 1999). The primary aim of the study is to gain a greater understanding of the nature, severity, frequency and sources of verbal abuse experienced by student nurses in health care settings in the south east of England, using as a definition, “the use of inappropriate words… causing distress” (Department of Health 2003). A convenience sample of 156 third year student nurses of all four branches of one preregistration nursing programme in the south east of England was studied with questionnaires distributed retrospectively; 11 4 student nurses returned the questionnaires equating to a response rate of 73%. Results 46% of respondents reported experiencing verbal abuse, 39% had witnessed other students experiencing verbal abuse and 61% reported that they were aware of other students experiencing verbal abuse. Students reported experiencing threats to kill, racial abuse, sexually orientated verbal abuse and bullying while gaining placement experience. Student nurses are a high risk group for experiencing verbal abuse whilst gaining placement experience.In the literature, mental health and learningdisability settings are viewed as high risk areasfor experiencing aggression (Beech and Leather 2003); this study suggests that student nurses experience verbal abuse in a variety of settings and verbal abuse may be more prevalent on general medical and surgical wards than previously expected

Are Deep Neural Networks SMARTer than Second Graders?

Recent times have witnessed an increasing number of applications of deep neural networks towards solving tasks that require superior cognitive abilities, e.g., playing Go, generating art, ChatGPT, etc. Such a dramatic progress raises the question: how generalizable are neural networks in solving problems that demand broad skills? To answer this question, we propose SMART: a Simple Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning Task and the associated SMART-101 dataset, for evaluating the abstraction, deduction, and generalization abilities of neural networks in solving visuo-linguistic puzzles designed specifically for children in the 6--8 age group. Our dataset consists of 101 unique puzzles; each puzzle comprises a picture and a question, and their solution needs a mix of several elementary skills, including arithmetic, algebra, and spatial reasoning, among others. To scale our dataset towards training deep neural networks, we programmatically generate entirely new instances for each puzzle, while retaining their solution algorithm. To benchmark performances on SMART-101, we propose a vision and language meta-learning model using varied state-of-the-art backbones. Our experiments reveal that while powerful deep models offer reasonable performances on puzzles in a supervised setting, they are not better than random accuracy when analyzed for generalization. We also evaluate the recent ChatGPT and other large language models on a part of SMART-101 and find that while these models show convincing reasoning abilities, the answers are often incorrect.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 2023. For the SMART-101 dataset, see https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.776179