Measuring mental health literacy in the UK workplace

Mental health literacy is the ability to stay mentally healthy through the retrieval, understanding, and use of health information. It is increasingly being considered an important part of overall health literacy. The ability to measure it is crucial. Firstly, higher levels of mental health literacy may be linked to lower levels of mental illness. Secondly, it can help to inform policies aimed at filling the gaps in people’s knowledge about mental health. Currently, many measures exist and are used, but most have not been thoroughly tested for reliability nor validity. It is unknown whether many of these measures are consistent and test what they are designed to test. The World Health Organisation highlights the workplace as an area in need of policies to improve attitudes toward and knowledge of mental health. Jobs have become increasingly psychologically-demanding. This research will examine the reliability of one measure of mental health literacy in a workplace population. The chosen measure is the Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Short Form (Fischer and Farina, 1995). It is a questionnaire that asks participants to give a score from 0 to 3 for ten items (0=disagree — 1=partly disagree —2=partly agree — 3=agree). A higher overall score indicates more favourable attitudes toward seeking psychological help. Charity employees will be asked to complete the questionnaire. Statistical tests will then explore whether each question contributes equally to the measurement. This project will contribute to the establishment of reliable and valid measures of mental health literacy for the workplace

Comprehensive Analysis of Arkansas Teacher Salaries: State, Region, and District

School funding has been an area of contention in the courts of nearly every state. Many of these court cases have challenged the constitutionality of state funding formulas, arguing the funding system was inadequate or inequitable because poor urban or rural districts often faced a disadvantage in garnering tax dollars for education. Specific to Arkansas, in the 1983 decision Dupree v. Alma School District, the Arkansas Supreme Court declared the state’s funding system was not meeting its constitutional requirements

Structural design of the 2013 Santa Clara University Solar Decathlon \u27radiant house\u27

The Structural Team for the Santa Clara University Solar Decathlon 2013 Radiant House achieved the task of designing a structurally operative, yet efficient, innovative, and sustainable house that satisfies the needs of everyone from Team Radiant House. The loadings to be considered in the structural design were: dead load, live load, wind load, seismic load, and roof load. The house design implements a classic system of joists, beams, studs, and shear walls to transfer loads to the piers, and finally to the foundations, in combination with a steel framing system to direct loads, increase stiffness and simplify connections for ease of construction, and transportation. The house was designed in softwood timber, with the intent of switching the material to bamboo in the joists and shear wall elements, an intent which was achieved in accordance with the success of other senior design groups. Santa Clara\u27s 2013 Solar Decathlon Radiant House uses the structural engineering as a crucial element in showing new methods of sustainable development and design looked for in the Solar Decathlon Competition

Using an accumulation of deficits approach to measure frailty in a population of home care users with intellectual and developmental disabilities: an analytical descriptive study

Potential deficits within-category correlation. Unadjusted odds ratio for 1-year admission to long-term care and the 42 FI items, sorted from strongest to weakest association. (DOCX 16 kb

Effect of Sleep on the Attentiveness of Elementary School Students

Sleep is known to be important in the development of children and their cognitive functioning. This study worked to establish correlation between amount of sleep and attentiveness in schoolaged children. This study surveyed the parents of 10 third graders on their child’s sleep habits. The children were read a story in class and asked to answer questions based on details in the story. The data obtained from this quiz and the parent’s survey responses were then compared to see if there was a relation. The results of this study were inconclusive. When genders were separated, it was found that males slept the most but females got more answers correct on the quiz. However, when the data was organized based on the recommended sleep amount for this age, it was found that children who met the recommendation answered more questions correctly compared to those who did not

Learning what high quality compassionate care means for cancer patients and translating that into practice

In 2010, UCLPartners, a partnership of health care providers and universities in North Central London, began a collaboration with local commissioners that aimed to think about cancer care and diagnosis differently. Understanding that a good patient experience can only be delivered by putting patients first and working together along their journey from symptoms to recovery, we brought clinical leaders together with patients to think about how to improve outcomes for patients, outside institutional barriers. From the very beginning this new network, an integrated cancer system, focused on understanding what mattered most to patients and organising how it worked and how it measured success around this. Co-designed by conversations and with contributions from over 1,000 clinicians and over 200 patients, London Cancer’s ten things that matter most to patients are embedded throughout the continuing work of this organisation. In this article our work to develop these ten topics is described alongside how we used this to create a truly patient centred integrated cancer system for a population of 3.5 million people in London and Essex

Developing and refining biological indicators for condition assessments in an integrated monitoring program

[Extract] Indicators representative of ecosystem condition are required for the long-term monitoring of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in a Reef Integrated Monitoring and Reporting Program (RIMREP), which tracks progress towards Reef 2050 Plan targets and objectives. Seagrass meadows are highly sensitive to climatic conditions and environmental pressures such as water quality, as seen through recent (past 10 years) changes in abundance in the GBR (McKenzie, et al., 2016). Due to these impacts, GBR seagrass meadows underwent a period of decline from 2009 to 2011. Widespread loss of seagrass occurred, but in 2015 many meadows had started recovering. The storage reserves within seagrass rhizomes were tested for suitability as a complimentary indicator in the MMP/RIMREP because previous studies had suggested that they are good indicators. We set out to test the relationships between total non-structural carbohydrates (TNSC) and seagrass condition (i.e. trend in abundance, either declining pre 2011 or recovering post 2011), seagrass abundance, water temperature and daily light in a temporal analysis using linear models. Samples were collected quarterly from 2008 to 2015 from four locations (8 sites) for three species (917 samples in total) in the Wet Tropics and Burdekin regions. TNSC was significantly (p<0.001) lower pre 2011 during the period of decline (181and 192 mg gDW-1for intertidal sites pooled and subtidal sites pooled, respectively) than post 2011 during recovery (277 and 289 mg gDW-1) for H. uninervis. A similar trend was observed for T. hemprichii, which occurred at intertidal sites only (168 mg gDW-1 in decline and 208 mg gDW-1in recovery), but not for C. serrulata which had the fewest available data points. The differences were even greater when investigating individual sites. TNSC were also correlated (p<0.001) to seagrass abundance during both the decline and recovery phases. TNSC was positively correlated to water temperature, though the period being assessed was relatively mild in terms of temperature extremes. Therefore, light was the main pressure assessed in this project. A direct effect of light limitation (daily light, average of 30 days prior to TNSC collection) on TNSC was not observed, in fact there was a slight negative effect of light in some analyses. This was contrary to our hypothesis, as low light, at least in part, drove declines in seagrass abundance from 2009 –2011. In an additional spatial analysis, differences in TNSC among regions and habitat types were assessed from 39 sites collected in late 2014 across the GBR. This spatial analysis was carried out to explore representativeness of the sites used in the temporal analysis. There was little difference in TNSC among habitats; however, TNSC varied among NRMs and were lowest in the Mackay Whitsunday and Fitzroy NRMs. This exploration of storage reserves, undertaken at a time of dynamic meadow changes, has yielded exciting results on their variation with meadow condition and abundance. However, we did not provide conclusive evidence to support the inclusion of TNSC as an indicator in monitoring programs such as the MMP at this stage, because the link to the main environmental pressure tested –light –was not demonstrated by this analysis. Irrespective of this, TNSC was an indicator of cumulative stress (being correlated to abundance and condition), but the specific pressure(s) could not be identified. This provides justification for further inquiry into the effect of other pressures (e.g. nutrients and flood plume exposure), other biological processes (e.g. reproduction and meadow expansion) and to obtain further data on other species. We also tested the relationship between %cover and biomass, with the aim of developing biomass calibration formulae. Above-ground biomass and %cover was measured in seven mono-specific meadows for four species and four habitat types. Above ground biomass was highly correlated (p<0.001) to % cover, and the correlation was further improved (lower AIC) by factoring canopy height into the calibration. Even after canopy height was included in the calibration, canopy height strongly affected the calibration values and highlighted the importance of habitat/morphology-specific calibration formulae. Further work is required to capture all species and habitat/morphology combinations that are routinely monitored. With further work, these calibration values will enable integration among seagrass monitoring programs including Queensland Ports Seagrass Monitoring Program and GBR historical baseline data

All Faiths & None: A Guide to Protecting Religious Liberty for Everyone

Religious liberty rights have been immeasurably damaged over the past several years — often in the name of protecting religious liberty. Government officials have embraced Islamophobic policies and rhetoric; shut the door on refugees fleeing religious persecution; elevated the religious rights of their political allies over the rights — religious and otherwise — of other communities; used religion as a tool of economic deregulation; and denigrated the beliefs of religious minorities, atheists, and religious progressives. To achieve true freedom for those of all faiths and none, a complete overhaul of religious liberty policy, and a new understanding of what this right truly means, is necessary. This report offers guidance on how a future presidential administration could protect religious freedom — not merely for a favored few, but for everyone. While we discuss specific policy measures necessary to protect religious liberty, the report is organized around a set of overarching principles in order to provide more holistic guidance about the true meaning of religious freedom

Faculty Perspectives of Academic Integrity During COVID-19: A Mixed Methods Study of Four Canadian Universities

Faculty members are crucial partners in promoting academic integrity at Canadian universities, but their needs related to academic integrity are neither well documented nor understood. To address this gap, we developed a mixed methods survey to gather faculty perceptions of facilitators and barriers to using the existing academic integrity procedures, policies, resources, and supports required to promote academic integrity. In this article, we report the data collected from 330 participants at four Canadian universities. Responses pointed to the importance of individual factors, such as duty to promote academic integrity, as well as contextual factors, such as teaching load, class size, class format, availability of teaching assistant support, and consistency of policies and procedures, in supporting or hindering academic integrity. We also situated these results within a micro (individual), meso (departmental), macro (institutional), and mega (community) framework. Results from this study contribute to the growing body of empirical evidence about faculty perspectives on academic integrity in Canadian higher education and can inform the continued development of existing academic integrity supports at universities.Les membres du corps professoral sont des partenaires essentiels dans la promotion de l’intégrité académique dans les universités canadiennes. Toutefois, leurs besoins en cette matière ne sont ni bien documentés ni bien compris. Afin de combler cette lacune, nous avons recueilli, grâce à une méthode de recherche mixte, les perceptions des professeurs quant aux obstacles et aux facilitateurs en lien avec l’utilisation des procédures, politiques, ressources et services de soutien pour la promotion de l’intégritéacadémique. Dans cet article, nous rapportons les données recueillies auprès de 330 participants dans quatre universités canadiennes. Les réponses soulignent l’importance des facteurs individuels tels que le devoir de promouvoir l’intégrité académique. De plus, des facteurs contextuels tels que la charge d’enseignement, la taille et le format de la classe, la disponibilité du soutien  d’assistants d’enseignement et la cohérence des politiques et des procédures peuvent soutenir ou entraver l’intégrité académique. Nous avons également situé ces résultats dans un cadre micro (individuel), méso (départemental), macro (institutionnel) et méga (communautaire). Les résultats de cette étude contribuent à mettre en lumière les perspectives des professeurs sur l’intégrité académiquedans l’enseignement supérieur canadien. Ils peuvent également donner un aperçu des besoins en développement professionnel et du soutien nécessaire dans les universités

Electric Vehicle Energy Impacts

The objective of this research project was to evaluate the impacts of electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation on reducing petroleum imports and greenhouse gas emissions to Hawaii. In 2015, the state of Hawaii mandated fossil fuel electric power displacement by imposing Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) that will reach 100% renewable electricity generation by 2045. With small, remote and isolated island electricity grids, utilities in Hawaii face unprecedented technical and economic challenges to meet these goals with exceedingly high levels of intermittent wind and PV power generation. To meet these RPS goals, EVs become increasingly important in helping to balance intermittent power generation by providing a controllable load, and potentially an energy storage medium as well. In this work, high fidelity grid modeling and analysis of EV energy use and emissions was conducted for the Island of Oahu with the focus on the number of vehicles, charging strategies, and wind and PV penetration levels at present and in the future. Comparisons were made for different vehicle types and fuel mixes. Additionally, the state of EV integration into Hawaii\u27s electric power grid was assessed and reported, including current challenges