When a workforce strategy won't work : critique on current policy direction in England, UK

“The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Journal of Intellectual Disabilities: JOID, Vol.14 Issue 4, 2010, Copyright SAGE Publications Ltd on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/ "This editorial is based on findings from a regional review of educational commissioning, and workforce issues for one Strategic Health Authority in England. Known as the ‘Valued People Project’ (VPP) it commenced in May 2008 and was undertaken in response to expressed concerns by regional key stakeholders regarding education commissioning specifically of pre-registration learning disability nursing, and the contribution of the specialist learning disability health workforce more generally (Gates, 2009). This work was also undertaken as a consequence of the scale and cumulative effect of changes to education, workforce, professional regulation and central health and social care policy that has affected people with learning disabilities, and the services and personnel that support them.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Public awareness and healthcare professional advice for obesity as a risk factor for cancer in the UK:a cross-sectional survey

BACKGROUND: Overweight and obesity is the second biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking, causing ~3.4 million deaths worldwide. This study provides current UK data on awareness of the link between obesity and cancer by socio-demographic factors, including BMI, and explores to what degree healthcare professionals provide weight management advice to patients. METHODS: Cross-sectional survey of 3293 adults completed an online survey in February/March 2016, weighted to be representative of the UK population aged 18+. RESULTS: Public awareness of the link between obesity and cancer is low (25.4% unprompted and 57.5% prompted). Higher levels of awareness existed for least deprived groups (P < 0.001), compared to more deprived groups. Most respondents had seen a healthcare practitioner in the past 12 months (91.6%) and 17.4% had received advice about their weight, although 48.4% of the sample were overweight/obese. CONCLUSION: Cancer is not at the forefront of people’s minds when considering health conditions associated with overweight or obesity. Socio-economic disparities exist in health knowledge across the UK population, with adults from more affluent groups being most aware. Healthcare professionals are uniquely positioned to provide advice about weight, but opportunities for intervention are currently under-utilized in healthcare settings

Strong Structural Controllability and Zero Forcing

In this chapter, we study controllability and output controllability of systems defined over graphs. Specifically, we consider a family of state-space systems, where the state matrix of each system has a zero/non-zero structure that is determined by a given directed graph. Within this setup, we investigate under which conditions all systems in this family are controllable, a property referred to as strong structural controllability. Moreover, we are interested in conditions for strong structural output controllability. We will show that the graph-theoretic concept of zero forcing is instrumental in these problems. In particular, as our first contribution, we prove necessary and sufficient conditions for strong structural controllability in terms of so-called zero forcing sets. Second, we show that zero forcing sets can also be used to state both a necessary and a sufficient condition for strong structural output controllability. In addition to these main results, we include interesting results on the controllability of subfamilies of systems and on the problem of leader selection.</p