Educating novice practitioners to detect elder financial abuse: A randomised controlled trial

© 2014 Harries et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background - Health and social care professionals are well positioned to identify and intervene in cases of elder financial abuse. An evidence-based educational intervention was developed to advance practitioners’ decision-making in this domain. The objective was to test the effectiveness of a decision-training educational intervention on novices’ ability to detect elder financial abuse. The research was funded by an E.S.R.C. grant reference RES-189-25-0334. Methods - A parallel-group, randomised controlled trial was conducted using a judgement analysis approach. Each participant used the World Wide Web to judge case sets at pre-test and post-test. The intervention group was provided with training after pre-test testing, whereas the control group were purely given instructions to continue with the task. 154 pre-registration health and social care practitioners were randomly allocated to intervention (n78) or control (n76). The intervention comprised of written and graphical descriptions of an expert consensus standard explaining how case information should be used to identify elder financial abuse. Participants’ ratings of certainty of abuse occurring (detection) were correlated with the experts’ ratings of the same cases at both stages of testing. Results - At pre-test, no differences were found between control and intervention on rating capacity. Comparison of mean scores for the control and intervention group at pre-test compared to immediate post-test, showed a statistically significant result. The intervention was shown to have had a positive moderate effect; at immediate post-test, the intervention group’s ratings had become more similar to those of the experts, whereas the control’s capacity did not improve. The results of this study indicate that the decision-training intervention had a positive effect on detection ability. Conclusions - This freely available, web-based decision-training aid is an effective evidence-based educational resource. Health and social care professionals can use the resource to enhance their ability to detect elder financial abuse. It has been embedded in a web resource at http://www.elderfinancialabuse.co.uk.ESR

Outcomes from elective colorectal cancer surgery during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

This study aimed to describe the change in surgical practice and the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on mortality after surgical resection of colorectal cancer during the initial phases of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

Chloroplast DNA from lettuce and Barnadesia (Asteraceae): structure, gene localization, and characterization of a large inversion

We have cloned into plasmids 17 of 18 lettuce chloroplast DNA SacI fragments covering 96% of the genome. The cloned fragments were used to construct cleavage maps for 10 restriction enzymes for the chloroplast genomes of lettuce ( Lactuca sativa ) and Barnadesia caryophylla , two distantly related species in the sunflower family (Asteraceae). Both genomes are approximately 151 kb in size and contain a 25 kb inverted repeat. We also mapped the position and orientation of 37 chloroplast DNA genes. The mapping studies reveal that chloroplast DNAs of lettuce and Barnadesia differ by a 22 kb inversion in the large single copy region. Barnadesia has retained the primitive land plant genome arrangement, while the inversion has occurred in a lettuce lineage. The endpoints of the derived lettuce inversion were located by comparison to the well-characterized spinach and tobacco genomes. Both endpoints are located in intergenic spacers within tRNA gene clusters; one cluster being located downstream from the atpA gene and the other upstream from the psbD gene. The endpoint near the atpA gene is very close to one endpoint of a 20 kb inversion in wheat (Howe et al. 1983; Quigley and Weil 1985). Comparison of the restriction site maps gives an estimated sequence divergence of 3.7% for the lettuce and Barnadesia genomes. This value is relatively low compared to previous estimates for other angiosperm groups, suggesting a high degree of sequence conservation in the Asteraceae.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/46961/1/294_2004_Article_BF00384619.pd

Resource Warfare, Pacification and the Spectacle of ‘Green’ Development: Logics of Violence in Engineering Extraction in Southern Madagascar

Bringing political ecology's concern with the critical politics of nature and resource violence into dialogue with key debates in political geography, critical security studies and research on the geographies and phenomenology of violence and warfare, this paper explores strategies ‘from above’ in relation to the establishment and operation of the Rio Tinto QIT-Madagascar Minerals (QMM) ilmenite mine in southeast Madagascar. While QMM claims to be a responsible ‘green’ self-regulator and sustainable development actor, it has triggered serious social, environmental and legal conflicts since its inception, including allegations of a ‘double land grab’ to accommodate mining activities and compensatory biodiversity offsetting. We argue that ‘pacification’, theorised as a productive form of violence that works through the re-ordering of socio-nature, underwrites the forms of ‘security’, ‘stability’ and even ‘sustainability’ that facilitate multiple and overlapping strategies of value extraction in the territorial and extra-territorial spaces occupied by the QMM mine partnership. By situating these dynamics historically, we identify ways in which pacification draws upon sedimented and evolving logics of racialised violence to facilitate operations and silence opposition

Towards a model of the non-industrial public sector in Britain, 1955-1978

SIGLELD:3597.78(157) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo