Care in mind : improving the mental health of children and young people in state care in Scotland

Some five thousand children and young people are in residential and foster care in Scotland. Many experience poor outcomes and concern about the quality of care has led to a number of government initiatives including the registration of care services and the social care workforce. Children and young people in state care experience a high level of mental health problems. Mental health services, however, have not served this vulnerable group well. The issue of the mental health of children and young people is now high on the government's agenda. A national needs assessment has set out an important agenda for the development of services. In addition, a number of innovative projects have focused on meeting the mental health needs of children and young people in state care. It is important that these developments lead to integrated and flexible mental health services in order to improve outcomes and well-being of children and young people in state care in Scotland

'Nae too bad': job satisfaction and staff morale in Scottish residential child care

In 2003, the National Children's Bureau and the Social Education Trust published a report - Better Than You Think -on staff morale, qualifications and retention in residential child care in England (Mainey, 2003a; Mainey, 2003b). It found that levels of morale and job satisfaction were not low despite the adverse environment in which residential care operates. Residential care in the modern world is intended to be mainly a temporary placement for some of the most demanding young people who need to be looked after and accommodated. The sector also continues to struggle with the aftermath of a number of high profile public inquiries of the abuse of children and young people in residential care (Kent, 1997; Marshall, Jamieson & Finlayson, 1999; Utting, 1997; Waterhouse, 2000). Residential child care in Scotland is under pressure to improve standards of care in a climate of negative media attention and public suspicion. It was in this context that the Social Education Trust funded a parallel study of job satisfaction and staff morale in Scotland (Milligan, Kendrick & Avan, 2004)

Historical abuse in residential child care in Scotland 1950 -1995

This is a systemic review: it's about systems - the systems of laws, rules and regulations (the regulatory framework) that governed residential schools and children's homes. It's about how these schools and homes complied with the regulatory framework, and about the systems for monitoring and inspecting the schools and homes

Maternal perceptions of supervision in preschool-aged children: a qualitative approach to understanding differences between families living in affluent and disadvantaged areas

Aim: To explore maternal perceptions of supervision and childhood unintentional injury in order to develop understanding and explanation for differences in unintentional injury rates between an advantaged and disadvantaged area. Background: Unintentional injury is the second cause of mortality and a significant cause of morbidity in the zero to four year age group. Children living in socio economic disadvantage are at a greater risk of unintentional injury than their more affluent counter-parts. Methods: Qualitative study using semi-structured interviews; content data analysis was undertaken. Participants included 37 mothers with a child aged less than five years; 16 living in an area of disadvantage (and high rate of childhood unintentional injury) and 21= living in an advantaged area (and low rate of childhood unintentional injury). Findings: Parents in both areas described the importance of parental supervision in reducing child unintentional injury risks. Parents in both areas used listening as a supervision strategy. Parents in both areas described how ‘when the child goes quiet’ that is a cue for them to make a visual check on the child. Listening was used more for boys than girls in both areas, but parents in the advantaged area used listening as a supervision strategy more frequently than those in the disadvantaged area. Parents described supervision strategies as being shaped by child character and age rather than child gender. Parents in both areas described similar strategies for managing distractions. An important difference was found with regard to older siblings; parents living in the advantaged area described older siblings as an injury risk to younger children. Parents in the disadvantaged area described older siblings as providing some supervision for younger children. Parents living in disadvantaged circumstances may face greater challenges with regard to supervision than parents living in advantaged circumstances and this may partly explain differences in injury risk

Transformation Systems for Socioeconomic Transition

A systemic design approach to purposeful socioeconomic transformation moves beyond idealistic future interventions to address deeply-embedded issues that prevent change here and now. We identify the persistence of consistent “deep system challenges” faced by complex change programs discovered across a range of cases. In the case study of sustainable seafood practices at the industry level, we show the development of the transformation system process and its theoretical and methodological support. These deep system challenges represent six knots of complex and interconnected problems demanding new organising approaches. These challenges were identified over a wide range of cases and have been studied since 2016 in an ongoing action research programme. The deeply-rooted social complexity of these systemic (wicked) challenges prevents the effectiveness of superficial attempts at quick-gain change in organisations and multi-stakeholder networks where these challenges exist and persist. Shifting these system dynamics is well beyond the capacity of any single or small set of change initiatives. Instead, we argue for an approach that involves catalysing what we call transformation systems into existence and greater transformative power – or a transformation system strategy. A transformation system strategy involves the development of capacities and infrastructures that absorb the complexity of these systems challenges across a network or organisation. For such expansive contexts as socioeconomic and industry-level transformation, for example, in the present case, the complexly interrelated seafood industry, the organising potential of smaller, faster-paced change initiatives can be mobilised through purposeful transformation systems. These are developed by transformation catalysts that serve as experimental, evaluable system-change deployments that draw resources and prepare networks to form new structures that regenerate the transformation system itself

Theoretical and experimental infrared spectra of hydrated and dehydrated sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone)

Time-dependent FT-IR spectra of sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone) during dehydration show diminishing 1081 cm−1 and 1023 cm−1 band intensities concurrent with the emergence and shifting of bands at 1362 cm−1 and 898 cm−1. Animations of density functional theory calculated normal modes enable assignment of the 1081 cm−1 and 1023 cm−1 bands as group modes that include a sulfonate exchange site with C3v local symmetry, while the 1362 cm−1 and 898 cm−1 bands are assigned as group modes that include an associated sulfonic acid with no local symmetry (C1). In contrast to analogously assigned Nafion group mode bands, the SPEEK C3v and C1 bands coexist throughout the entire dehydration–hydration cycle, suggesting the presence of associated and dissociated exchange sites in SPEEK at all states-of-hydration. This supports a morphological model for SPEEK featuring branched hydrophilic domains and dead-end aqueous confines

DNA barcoding cannot discriminate between Sardinella tawilis and S. hualiensis (Clupeiformes: Clupeidae)

Sardinella tawilis, the only known freshwater sardinella in the world, is endemic to Taal Lake, Philippines. Previous studies found the Taiwan sardinella, S. hualiensis, to be morphologically very similar to S. tawilis and identified it as the marine sister species of S. tawilis. In this study, DNA barcoding using the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene was carried out to analyze species demarcation in the Sardinella genus, focusing primarily on the relationship between S. tawilis and S. hualiensis. The neighbour-joining (NJ) tree that was constructed using Kimura 2-parameter (K2P) model showed a single clade for the two species with 100% bootstrap support. K2P interspecific genetic divergence ranged from 0% to 0.522%, which is clearly below the suggested 3–3.5% cutoff for species discrimination. Recombination activating gene 1 (RAG1), mitochondrial control region (CR), cytochrome b, 16S rRNA, and S7 markers were used to further validate the results. Sardinella tawilis and S. hualiensis clustered together with a bootstrap support of 99–100% in each of the NJ trees. Low interspecific genetic distances between S. tawilis and S. hualiensis for all the markers except CR could be attributed to incipient allopatric speciation