Enabling practitioners working with young people who self-harm

Purpose: This paper outlines a United Kingdom based interdisciplinary workforce development project that had the aim of improving service delivery for children and young people who self-harm or are feeling suicidal. Approach: This innovative practice-higher-education partnershiputilised an iterative consultation process to establish the local workforce need and then facilitated the systematic synthesis and presentation of evidence-based clinical guidelines in a practical format, for staff working directly with young people who self-harm in non-mental health settings. Outcomes: The development, content and structure of this contextualised resourceis presented, along with emerging outcomes and learning from the team.It is anticipated that this may also be a useful strategy and resource for other teams in other areas and is intended to provide a template that can be adapted by other localities to meet the specific needs of their own workforce. Practical Implications: The paper demonstrates how higher education-practice partnershipscan make clinical guidelines and research evidence in a field often thought of as highly specialist,accessible to all staff. It also shows a process of liaison and enhanced understanding across universal/specialist mental health service thresholds. Originality/Value: This paperdemonstrates how collaborative partnerships can work to bridge the gap between evidence-based guidelinesand their implementation in practice, through innovative multi-agency initiatives. Keywords: Self-harm, suicide, children, young people, interdisciplinary, workforce development, risk assessment, stakeholder engagement, mental health, adolescent Paper Type: case stud

B-physics computations from Nf=2 tmQCD

We present an accurate lattice QCD computation of the b-quark mass, the B and Bs decay constants, the B-mixing bag-parameters for the full four-fermion operator basis, as well as estimates for \xi and f_{Bq}\sqrt{B_q} extrapolated to the continuum limit and the physical pion mass. We have used Nf = 2 dynamical quark gauge configurations at four values of the lattice spacing generated by ETMC. Extrapolation in the heavy quark mass from the charm to the bottom quark region has been carried out using ratios of physical quantities computed at nearby quark masses, having an exactly known infinite mass limit.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, presented at the 31st International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2013), 29 July - 3 August 2013, Mainz, German

Flavour Physics and CP Violation in the Standard Model and Beyond

We present the invited lectures given at the Third IDPASC School which took place in Santiago de Compostela in January 2013. The students attending the school had very different backgrounds, some of them were doing their Ph.D. in experimental particle physics, others in theory. As a result, and in order to make the lectures useful for most of the students, we focused on basic topics of broad interest, avoiding the more technical aspects of Flavour Physics and CP Violation. We make a brief review of the Standard Model, paying special attention to the generation of fermion masses and mixing, as well as to CP violation. We describe some of the simplest extensions of the SM, emphasising novel flavour aspects which arise in their framework.Comment: Invited talk at the Third IDPASC School 2013, January 21st - February 2nd 2013, Santiago de Compostela, Galiza, Spain; 36 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables; version with few misprints correcte

On The Potential of Minimal Flavour Violation

Assuming the Minimal Flavour Violation hypothesis, we derive the general scalar potential for fields whose background values are the Yukawa couplings. We analyze the minimum of the potential and discuss the fine-tuning required to dynamically generate the mass hierarchies and the mixings between different quark generations. Two main cases are considered, corresponding to Yukawa interactions being effective operators of dimension five or six (or, equivalently, resulting from bi-fundamental and fundamental scalar fields, respectively). At the renormalizable and classical level, no mixing is naturally induced from dimension five Yukawa operators. On the contrary, from dimension six Yukawa operators one mixing angle and a strong mass hierarchy among the generations result.Comment: 33 pages, 6 figures; Note added in proof on the stability of the minima of the scalar potential; results unchanged; references adde

Skeletal muscle dysfunction is associated with derangements in mitochondrial bioenergetics (but not UCP3) in a rodent model of sepsis

Muscle dysfunction is a common feature of severe sepsis and multi-organ failure. Recent evidence implicates bioenergetic dysfunction and oxidative damage as important underlying pathophysiological mechanisms. Increased abundance of uncoupling protein-3 (UCP-3) in sepsis suggests increased mitochondrial proton leak, which may reduce mitochondrial coupling efficiency but limit ROS production. Using a murine model, we examined metabolic, cardiovascular and skeletal muscle contractile changes following induction of peritoneal sepsis in wild-type and Ucp3(-/-) mice. Mitochondrial membrane potential (Δψm) was measured using two-photon microscopy in living diaphragm, and contractile function was measured in diaphragm muscle strips. The kinetic relationship between membrane potential and oxygen consumption was determined using a modular kinetic approach in isolated mitochondria. Sepsis was associated with significant whole body metabolic suppression, hypothermia and cardiovascular dysfunction. Maximal force generation was reduced and fatigue accelerated in ex vivo diaphragm muscle strips from septic mice. Mitochondrial membrane potential was lower in the isolated diaphragm from septic mice despite normal substrate oxidation kinetics and proton leak in skeletal muscle mitochondria. Even though wild-type mice exhibited an absolute 26 ± 6% higher UCP-3 protein abundance at 24 hours, no differences were seen in whole animal or diaphragm physiology, nor in survival rates, between wild-type and Ucp3(-/-) mice. In conclusion, this murine sepsis model shows a hypometabolic phenotype with evidence of significant cardiovascular and muscle dysfunction. This was associated with lower Δψm and alterations in mitochondrial ATP turnover and phosphorylation pathway. However, UCP-3 does not play an important functional role, despite its upregulation

Pain and learning in primary school: a population-based study.

Despite the frequency of pain among children, little is known about its effects on learning and school outcomes. The objective of this study was to quantify the association of pain and academic achievement while taking into account the presence of co-occurring emotional symptoms. A population-based stratified random sample of 1239 students aged 8 to 9 years from primary schools in Melbourne, Australia, was recruited for the Childhood to Adolescence Transition Study. Children indicated sites of pain that had lasted for a day or longer in the past month using a pain manikin. Depressive- and anxiety-related symptoms were assessed using child-reported items. National assessment results for reading and numeracy were used to measure academic achievement. Sixty-five percent of children reported pain in at least 1 body site and 16% reported chronic pain. Increasing number of pain sites was associated with poorer reading scores in a dose-response fashion (β = -3.1; 95% confidence interval -4.9 to -1.3; P < 0.001). The association was only partly attenuated when adjusting for emotional symptoms (β = -2.6; 95% confidence interval -4.5 to -0.8; P < 0.001) and was not moderated by emotional symptoms. Children with chronic pain were a year behind their peers in both reading and numeracy. Among primary school students, pain was associated with lower reading scores even after adjusting for the presence of emotional symptoms. Although population-based longitudinal studies will be required to ascertain consistency and possible causality, grounds exist for considering pain and emotional symptoms in the assessment of children with reading difficulties

Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20

A class of pyrrole derivatives endowed with analgesic/anti-inflammatory activity

We report the synthesis and bio-pharmacological evaluation of a class of pyrrole derivatives featuring a small appendage fragment (carbaldehyde, oxime, nitrile) on the central core. Compound 1c proved to be extremely effective in vivo, showing an interesting anti-nociceptic profile that is comparable to reference compounds already marketed, hence representing a great stimulus for a further improvement of this class of molecules

A cross sectional study of water quality from dental unit water lines in dental practices in the West of Scotland

OBJECTIVE: To determine the microbiological quality of water from dental units in a general practice setting and current practice for disinfection of units. DESIGN: A cross-sectional study of the water quality from 40 dental units in 39 general practices and a questionnaire of the disinfection protocols used in those practices. SETTING: NHS practices in primarydental care. SUBJECTS: Thirty-nine general practices from the West of Scotland. METHODS: Water samples were collected on two separate occasions from dental units and analysed for microbiological quality by the total viable count (TVC) method. Water specimens were collected from the triple syringe, high speed outlet, cup filler and surgery tap. Each participating practitioner was asked to complete a questionnaire. Results Microbial contamination was highest from the high speed outlet followed by the triple syringe and cup filler. On average, the TVC counts from the high speed water lines at 37 degrees C and for the high speed lines, triple syringe and cup filler at 22 degrees C were significantly higher than that from the control tap water specimens. The study included units from 11 different manufacturers with ages ranging from under one year to over eight years. The age of the dental unit analysed did not appear to influence the level of microbial contamination. Five of the practices surveyed used disinfectants to clean the dental units but these had no significant effect on the microbiological quality of the water. The majority of dental units (25 out of 40) were never flushed with water between patients. A number of different non-sterile irrigants were used for surgical procedures. CONCLUSION: The microbiological quality of water from dental units in general dental practice is poor compared with that from drinking water sources. Suitable sterile irrigants should be used for surgical procedures in dental practice. Further work is required for pragmatic decontamination regimens of dental unit water lines in a general dental practice setting

Intersecting black branes in strong gravitational waves

We consider intersecting black branes with strong gravitational waves propagating along their worldvolume in the context of supergravity theories. Both near-horizon and space-filling gravitational wave modes are included in our ansatz. The equations of motion (originally, partial differential equations) are shown to reduce to ordinary differential equations, which include a Toda-like system. For special arrangements of intersecting black branes, the Toda-like system becomes integrable, permitting a more thorough analysis of the gravitational equations of motion.Comment: 17 pages; v2: cosmetic improvements, published versio