The mental health safety improvement programme: a national quality improvement collaborative to reduce restrictive practice in England

In 2018, 38 mental health inpatient wards belonging to NHS trusts across England took part in the national reducing restrictive practice collaborative project, which aimed to reduce the use of rapid tranquillisation, restraint and seclusion of patients by 33%. Teams were supported to use quality improvement tools by skilled coaches as part of a national collaborative learning system. At the end of the programme, the overall use of restrictive practice had reduced by 15%. Of the teams that achieved improvements, the average reduction in restrictive practice was 61%. Across the collaborative there were improvements in the mean monthly use of restraints and rapid tranquillisation, and in the total use of all three measures of restrictive practice combined. Support from quality improvement coaches allowed ideas to be tested across the collaborative, enabling the creation of a theory of change for reducing restrictive practice based on areas with a high degree of belief to inform future improvement work in this area

Aging and disease-relevant gene products in the neuronal transcriptome of the great pond snail (Lymnaea stagnalis): a potential model of aging, age-related memory loss, and neurodegenerative diseases

Modelling of human aging, age-related memory loss, and neurodegenerative diseases has developed into a progressive area in invertebrate neuroscience. Gold standard molluscan neuroscience models such as the sea hare (Aplysia californica) and the great pond snail (Lymnaea stagnalis) have proven to be attractive alternatives for studying these processes. Until now, A. californica has been the workhorse due to the enormous set of publicly available transcriptome and genome data. However, with growing sequence data, L. stagnalis has started to catch up with A. californica in this respect. To contribute to this and inspire researchers to use molluscan species for modelling normal biological aging and/or neurodegenerative diseases, we sequenced the whole transcriptome of the central nervous system of L. stagnalis and screened for the evolutionary conserved homolog sequences involved in aging and neurodegenerative/other diseases. Several relevant molecules were identified, including for example gelsolin, presenilin, huntingtin, Parkinson disease protein 7/Protein deglycase DJ-1, and amyloid precursor protein, thus providing a stable genetic background for L. stagnalis in this field. Our study supports the notion that molluscan species are highly suitable for studying molecular, cellular, and circuit mechanisms of the mentioned neurophysiological and neuropathological processes