Peer advocacy and access to healthcare for people who are homeless in London, UK: a mixed method impact, economic and process evaluation protocol.

INTRODUCTION: People who are homeless experience higher morbidity and mortality than the general population. These outcomes are exacerbated by inequitable access to healthcare. Emerging evidence suggests a role for peer advocates-that is, trained volunteers with lived experience-to support people who are homeless to access healthcare. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We plan to conduct a mixed methods evaluation to assess the effects (qualitative, cohort and economic studies); processes and contexts (qualitative study); fidelity; and acceptability and reach (process study) of Peer Advocacy on people who are homeless and on peers themselves in London, UK. People with lived experience of homelessness are partners in the design, execution, analysis and dissemination of the evaluation. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethics approval for all study designs has been granted by the National Health Service London-Dulwich Research Ethics Committee (UK) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's Ethics Committee (UK). We plan to disseminate study progress and outputs via a website, conference presentations, community meetings and peer-reviewed journal articles

Frenetic: A Network Programming Language

Modern networks provide a variety of interrelated services including routing, traffic monitoring, load balancing, and access control. Unfortunately, the languages used to program today’s networks lack modern features—they are usually defined at the low level of abstraction supplied by the underlying hardware and they fail to provide even rudimentary support for modular programming. As a result, network programs tend to be complicated, error-prone, and difficult to maintain. This paper presents Frenetic, a high-level language for programming distributed collections of network switches. Frenetic provides a declarative query language for classifying and aggregating network traffic as well as a functional reactive combinator library for describing high-level packet-forwarding policies. Unlike prior work in this domain, these constructs are—by design—fully compositional, which facilitates modular reasoning and enables code reuse. This important property is enabled by Frenetic’s novel runtime system which manages all of the details related to installing, uninstalling, and querying low-level packet-processing rules on physical switches. Overall, this paper makes three main contributions: (1) We analyze the state-of-the art in languages for programming networks and identify the key limitations; (2) We present a language design that addresses these limitations, using a series of examples to motivate and validate our choices; (3) We describe an implementation of the language and evaluate its performance on several benchmarks