Black women's activism and organisation in public health - struggles and strategies for better health and wellbeing

Using Avtar Brah's concept of 'diaspora space', this paper argues that Black women in the UK have organised in diaspora space to challenge inequities in health and develop strategies to improve health outcomes for black communities. The paper explores the post-war contribution of Black women nurses in the UK to public health, both as activists for change and as organisers of change. The paper concludes by exploring the confluences and synergies between the concept of ‘diaspora space’ and that of ‘(post) diaspora’ as espoused by Scafe (2018). The paper argues that both concepts are useful for understanding the ways in which Black women have used their agency to challenge health inequities

HRM in Chile : the impact of organisational culture

Purpose: This paper provides insight on the influence of organisational culture on HRM practices in Chile by exploring shared meanings (basic assumptions and beliefs) and organisational models that can be identified from activities, dynamics, social relationships and behaviours. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on research conducted in Chile where a combination of self-completion questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and non-participant observation was carried out in a non-probabilistic sample of 46 organisations. Findings: Findings suggest that there is a shared definition of work characterised by five elements; namely, the existence of great work pressure exerted by managers; a sustained focus of upper levels on organisational efficiency as an isolated element that does not include HRM; the inexistence of worker autonomy and empowerment; the use of administrative jargon and understandings of loyalty, dedication, compliance and professionalism as desired qualities in workers. The paper argues that there are three distinct categories of cultural discourse in Chilean organisations: pessimistic/fatalistic, optimistic/maniac and pragmatic/bureaucratic. Research limitations/implications: Due to the type of sampling used, findings cannot be taken to represent the whole of Chilean organisations.Practical implications: Data presented in this paper helps to understand many of the behaviours observed in Chilean organisations, which provides HR policy-makers and practitioners with sounder foundations for designing organisational programs, policies and action plans. Originality/value: The paper presents new evidence to increase empirical body of work addressing the relationship between organisational culture and HRM in developing countries, particularly in Latin America

Target 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals: Evidence in Schools in England

This report has been produced by Douglas Bourn, Director of Development Education Research Centre at UCL and Jenny Hatley from Bath Spa University, on behalf of the Our Shared World Coalition of organisations. The focus of Our Shared World is to lobby UK government and other policymakers on why Target 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals should be an integral component of all children and young people’s learning. This report has been commissioned by the network to gather evidence of the extent to which the themes of Target 4.7 of the Goals are already reflected within schools in England, and aims to demonstrate current levels of engagement in these themes, how they are being delivered, areas of success, identifiable gaps and what the priorities for policymakers should be in the future

The relationship between recalled self-esteem as a child and current levels of professional burnout among Anglican clergy in England

This study links and tests three strands of theory concerned with explaining individual differences in levels of professional burnout in general and among religious professionals in particular. These three strands concern the significance of current self-esteem, recalled self-esteem as a child, and personality. Data were provided by a sample of 1,278 male stipendiary parochial clergy working in the Church of England who completed the modified Maslach Burnout Inventory (specially designed for use among clergy), and the short-form Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (designed to measure the personality dimensions of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism), together with a semantic differential index of recalled self-esteem as a child. The bivariate correlation coefficients demonstrated significant associations between more positive self-esteem as a child and lower levels of professional burnout (higher personal accomplishment, lower emotional exhaustion and lower depersonalisation). The bivariate correlation coefficients also demonstrated significant associations between personality and professional burnout. Multiple regression analyses, however, demonstrated that the association between recalled self-esteem as a child and professional burnout largely disappeared after controlling for the personality variables. The conclusion is drawn that knowledge about the personality profile of clergy functions as a more secure predictor of susceptibility to professional burnout than knowledge about recalled self-esteem as a child

African-Caribbean Young Women in the UK and Cigarette Smoking

Cigarette smoking among African-Caribbean young women has been under- researched. This thesis investigates the reported patterns of and influences on cigarette smoking among young African-Caribbean women aged 14 to 16 years old in urban Britain. The study uses a multi-method, interdisciplinary research design which combines approaches from women’s studies and sociology of health to explore how ‘race’, class and gender influence cigarette smoking. A black feminist framework was adopted drawing on intersectionality theory. First, data on reported patterns and influences on smoking behaviour for 700 young people were collected using a self-completion questionnaire in schools in a city in the West Midlands to compare the influence of gender, ethnicity and social class on cigarette smoking behaviour and perceptions of cigarette smoking in a cross- section of young black and white people. Second, seven focus groups were conducted with first- and second-generation young African-Caribbean women to collect in-depth qualitative data on reported factors that influence smoking behaviour and the meanings that cigarette smoking has for this group. This research contributes to developing understanding of cigarette smoking in young African-Caribbean women in the UK; it widens and deepens existing work, adding a perspective that includes the dimensions of ‘race’ and ethnicity. Literature on gender and smoking exploring working-class identity exists but not an exploration of gender, ethnicity and class and how this is expressed through smoking behaviour. My findings contribute new knowledge to understanding young people’s smoking behaviour: whilst the African-Caribbean young women in this sample were more disadvantaged than their white female peers, they were less likely to smoke. Caribbean culture, family life and religion were central to their lives and to a large extent protected many young women from cigarette smoking. As such this research demonstrates findings based on predominantly one ethno-cultural group do not necessarily translate to other groups, even if they live under similar material conditions

A feasibility study to explore the governance processes required for linkage between dental epidemiological, and birth cohort, data in the UK

Birth cohort initiatives, such as ‘Born in Bradford’, provide a unique opportunity to study the influence of socio-economic and environmental factors acting in pregnancy, birth and infancy on the development of dental caries in later life. This paper describes a feasibility study which established the processes required, and outcomes of, successful linkage of oral health data collected by the 2013 three-year-old national dental epidemiology survey with the Born in Bradford birth cohort database. The necessary processes included achieving research permissions and ethical approval; creation of a data sharing agreement; ensuring data security and encrypted data transfer. With regard to the outcomes, a robust a priori statistical plan was developed. 152 three-year-old children were examined for the 2013 dental epidemiology survey in Bradford, and of those, 69 parents consented to data linkage believing that their child was part of the Born in Bradford cohort. However, only 36 of these 69 children were participating in the cohort. Of these, six children had obvious dentinal caries experience (dmft >0). There was insufficient power with such small numbers, to examine the association between birthweight and dental caries at the age of three-years-old. Key learning points from this feasibility study have informed the design of a larger study to link the 2014/5 five-year-old dental epidemiology surveys with the Born in Bradford cohort. This paper reveals the important methodological considerations for future data linkages between routine health data and research data

Named entity recognition in chemical patents using ensemble of contextual language models

Chemical patent documents describe a broad range of applications holding key reaction and compound information, such as chemical structure, reaction formulas, and molecular properties. These informational entities should be first identified in text passages to be utilized in downstream tasks. Text mining provides means to extract relevant information from chemical patents through information extraction techniques. As part of the Information Extraction task of the Cheminformatics Elsevier Melbourne University challenge, in this work we study the effectiveness of contextualized language models to extract reaction information in chemical patents. We assess transformer architectures trained on a generic and specialised corpora to propose a new ensemble model. Our best model, based on a majority ensemble approach, achieves an exact F1-score of 92.30% and a relaxed F1-score of 96.24%. The results show that ensemble of contextualized language models can provide an effective method to extract information from chemical patents