Double jeopardy : a socio-demographic profile of homeless jobseekers aged 18-35

This article reports on socio-demographic research that was undertaken as part of a broader project to improve service delivery to homeless jobseekers aged 18-35 years (Grace et 01 2005). The broader project, known as Yp4, is a randomised controlled trial of joined up services and programs for young homeless jobseekers. Yp4 is an initiative of four organisations: Hanover Welfare Services, Brotherhood of St Laurence, Melbourne Citymission and Loddon Mallee Housing Services This paper does not provide detailed information about the Yp4 trial, rather it reports on socio-demographic research undertaken to set the context in which Yp4 operates. For further details regarding Yp4 please see Horn (2004). When we set out to prepare a socio-demographic profile of homeless jobseekers aged 18-35 years, we found two main ways to count homelessness and at least two ways to quantify unemployment. Obtaining data and assessing its quality was far from easy, and this research was an exercise in frustration and perseverance. In this article we discuss the complexities of counting homelessness and unemployment, and the educated guesswork involved in estimating numbers of homeless jobseekers. We present a tentative socio-demographic profile; and we make suggestions regarding better access to data in the future

Multiple disruptions: circumstances and experiences of young people living with homelessness and unemployment

This article is about young people who have experienced both homelessness and unemployment, with their interacting impacts. While ‘young people’ is usually understood to include those beyond childhood and up to 25 years of age, the homelessness services that initiated YP4 decided that the project should focus on people in the first one-third of their expected working lives. Thus the eligible age group for YP4 was 18−35 years. In practice, 75 per cent of participants were aged 25 years and under. This paper presents a more detailed descriptive profile than has previously been published regarding the circumstances of young people living with homelessness and unemployment. This profile confirms and adds quantification to previously published material on the complex disadvantages experienced by these young people. Our findings are indicative of the circumstances of the broader population of young Australians in these circumstances

Client-centred Case Management: How Much Makes a Difference to Outcomes for Homeless Jobseekers?

Case management has become the predominant model for attempting to improve outcomes for young adults experiencing both homelessness and unemployment. However, there is little evidence-based knowledge about how young adults respond to case management, and how much intervention is needed to be effective. This Australian study utilised quantitative government data to investigate the effects of the amount of case management on key outcomes. With a purposive sample of 224 people aged 18-35, this study compared four different amounts of YP4 case management service received over a three-year period. Participants were categorised into four groupings depending on the number of case management contacts they received: 0-5, 6-20, 21-40, and 41-156. The findings show some significant group variations over the course of the trial in the areas of employment and accommodation. Participants who received 20 or more contacts had significantly better accommodation and employment outcomes than those who received fewer contacts

Challenges to Employment in Newly Emerging African Communities in Australia: A Review of the Literature

Newly emerging African communities (NEAC) in Australia face challenges in accessing employment, with consequences for both the immigrant and Australian host communities. This article presents a review of the literature on challenges to employment for NEAC in Australia. It gathers together, synthesises, and analyses previously fragmented evidence that should be used to inform social policy change and social program improvement. It focuses on African refugees and immigrants from the Horn of Africa region (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan) who have settled in Australia in the past 10 years. The review documents the challenges to employment for this group and highlights policy and practice implications including: streamlining the qualification recognition process; introducing culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) specialised job networks; resisting anti-NEAC sentiments, challenging stereotypes, and promoting diversity; introducing incentives to undertake volunteer work; revitalising existing English as a second language pedagogy; empowering CALD-specialised counselling services; and establishing CALD-specialised research and advocacy entities

Vulnerability and Post-Stroke Experiences of Working-Age Survivors During Recovery

Survivors who experience stroke of mild to moderate severity are typically discharged home quickly, with only minimal referral for rehabilitation follow-up or support to meet specific needs in recovery. Particular vulnerabilities of younger, higher functioning stroke survivors have received some recognition in international literature in recent years. This article reports on findings of a small Australian qualitative study focusing on recovery and return to work experiences of young higher functioning female stroke survivors, in particular exploring experiences of post-stroke vulnerability from participants’ own perspectives. Our research adds depth and nuance to this developing area of interest and research. Our findings include survivors’ reflections on the consequences of delayed diagnosis, the impacts of empowering and disempowering interactions with health care professionals, a general lack of access to psychosocial rehabilitation, and frustrations of financial hardship. Implications for health professionals, service systems, and income support provision are discussed, along with directions for future research

Crafting Quality of Life: Creativity and Well-Being

The “Everyday Creativity of Women Craftmakers” is a narrative research project exploring the ways that contemporary women narrate the meanings of home craft-making in their lives. Craft-making enjoys continuing popularity among contemporary women including young women, and women from different cultures and socio-economic groups. Many of these women have busy lives; they are juggling domestic responsibilities, motherhood and paid work and yet they make time and space for their craft-making. In this article, we focus on three of our participants who are mothers with children still living at home, the meanings craft-making has for them, and how craft-making is linked with their well-being and quality of life. We discuss the ways these three women use craft as both an expression of themselves as mothers, and as escape or relief from the demands of mothering. We explore a number of key themes emerging from the research: craft-making as a challenge and a creative outlet; craft-making and gift giving; intergenerational connections; and the strong belief on the part of these women that craft-making is important and in some instances vital for their well-being, and contributes substantially to the quality of their lives

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Adding 6 months of androgen deprivation therapy to postoperative radiotherapy for prostate cancer: a comparison of short-course versus no androgen deprivation therapy in the RADICALS-HD randomised controlled trial

Background Previous evidence indicates that adjuvant, short-course androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) improves metastasis-free survival when given with primary radiotherapy for intermediate-risk and high-risk localised prostate cancer. However, the value of ADT with postoperative radiotherapy after radical prostatectomy is unclear. Methods RADICALS-HD was an international randomised controlled trial to test the efficacy of ADT used in combination with postoperative radiotherapy for prostate cancer. Key eligibility criteria were indication for radiotherapy after radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer, prostate-specific antigen less than 5 ng/mL, absence of metastatic disease, and written consent. Participants were randomly assigned (1:1) to radiotherapy alone (no ADT) or radiotherapy with 6 months of ADT (short-course ADT), using monthly subcutaneous gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogue injections, daily oral bicalutamide monotherapy 150 mg, or monthly subcutaneous degarelix. Randomisation was done centrally through minimisation with a random element, stratified by Gleason score, positive margins, radiotherapy timing, planned radiotherapy schedule, and planned type of ADT, in a computerised system. The allocated treatment was not masked. The primary outcome measure was metastasis-free survival, defined as distant metastasis arising from prostate cancer or death from any cause. Standard survival analysis methods were used, accounting for randomisation stratification factors. The trial had 80% power with two-sided α of 5% to detect an absolute increase in 10-year metastasis-free survival from 80% to 86% (hazard ratio [HR] 0·67). Analyses followed the intention-to-treat principle. The trial is registered with the ISRCTN registry, ISRCTN40814031, and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT00541047. Findings Between Nov 22, 2007, and June 29, 2015, 1480 patients (median age 66 years [IQR 61–69]) were randomly assigned to receive no ADT (n=737) or short-course ADT (n=743) in addition to postoperative radiotherapy at 121 centres in Canada, Denmark, Ireland, and the UK. With a median follow-up of 9·0 years (IQR 7·1–10·1), metastasis-free survival events were reported for 268 participants (142 in the no ADT group and 126 in the short-course ADT group; HR 0·886 [95% CI 0·688–1·140], p=0·35). 10-year metastasis-free survival was 79·2% (95% CI 75·4–82·5) in the no ADT group and 80·4% (76·6–83·6) in the short-course ADT group. Toxicity of grade 3 or higher was reported for 121 (17%) of 737 participants in the no ADT group and 100 (14%) of 743 in the short-course ADT group (p=0·15), with no treatment-related deaths. Interpretation Metastatic disease is uncommon following postoperative bed radiotherapy after radical prostatectomy. Adding 6 months of ADT to this radiotherapy did not improve metastasis-free survival compared with no ADT. These findings do not support the use of short-course ADT with postoperative radiotherapy in this patient population