Are married women spatially constrained? A test of gender differentials in labour market outcomes

Numerous studies have shown that females fare less well than males in terms of relative earnings and occupational attainment, but few acknowledge the role played by differential gender migration patterns. This paper examines the relationship between marital status, spatial migration and various aspects of female labour market outcomes. It builds on the existing literature by analysing the issue for the first time using British data and focuses particularly on the possibility of constrained migration resulting in overeducation. Our research utilises the only British dataset - the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative (SCELI) dataset - that allows the measurement of overeducation alongside other dimensions of labour market outcomes.

Crossing the Tracks? More on Trends in the Training of Male and Female Workers in Great Britain

A small number of recent empirical studies for several countries has reported the intriguing finding that the ‘advantage’ previously enjoyed by men in respect of training incidence and reported in earlier work in the literature has been reversed. The present paper explores the sources of the gender differential in training incidence using Labour Force Survey data, updating previous U.K. studies and providing further insights into the above phenomenon. The results suggest that the greater part of the ‘gap’ typically relates to differences in characteristics, among which the most important relate to occupation, industry and sector (public/private).

Job Anxiety, Work-Related Psychological Illness and Workplace Performance

This paper uses matched employee-employer data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2004 to examine the determinants of employee job anxiety and work-related psychological illness. Job anxiety is found to be strongly related to the demands of the job as measured by factors such as occupation, education and hours of work. Average levels of employee job anxiety, in turn, are positively associated with work-related psychological illness among the workforce as reported by managers. The paper goes on to consider the relationship between psychological illness and workplace performance as measured by absence, turnover and labour productivity. Work-related psychological illness is found to be negatively associated with several measures of workplace performance.job anxiety, stress, absence, labour productivity

Informing radiography curriculum development: the views of UK radiology service managers concerning the ‘fitness for purpose’ of recent diagnostic radiography graduates

Recent years have seen significant changes in the way medical imaging services are delivered, rapid changes in technology and big increases in the number and ranges of examinations undertaken. Given these changes the study aimed to critically evaluate the fitness for purpose of newly qualified diagnostic radiography. The study employed a grounded theory approach to analyse the interviews of 20 radiology managers from a range of medical imaging providers across the UK. Four key themes emerged from the analysis. These were: curriculum content and structure review; diversification in the role of the radiographer; professionalism and coping and the reformation of career structures. The results indicate the role of the radiographer is now quite nebulous and challenge radiology managers and educators to design curricula and career structures which are better matched the role of the radiographer in the very rapidly changing technological, organisational and social contexts of modern society

Soft skills and hard lessons: the future of radiography education in the UK

The diagnostic radiography BSc curriculum has not seen fundamental changes in recent years with the focus of study predominantly centred around the development of competencies within projection/plain radiography accompanied by a limited experience in a range of other imaging modalities. The operation of a modern imaging department now involves the utilisation of a wide variety of imaging modalities many of which have seen large increases in their workload. The study reports of the findings generated from 20 semi-structured interviews undertaken with radiology service managers from across the United Kingdom. An interview schedule was generated which was developed to elucidate: recent changes in working practices within imaging departments; additional training which needs to be provided for recent graduates and the skills required for the future workforce. The results were analysed using a Straussian Grounded Theory approach in which responses were coded and then grouped using thematic analysis. Results showed the current model of education only partly supports the needs of the modern workforce imaging with specific concerns raised regarding the communication skills, professionalism and clinical skills of newly qualified graduates. Managers foresee the continuing development of the four tier structure; further increases in the workload associated with all modalities and the increasing need for ‘specialisation’ at an earlier stage the career of the Radiographer. Projection imaging, mobile and theatre work will continue to play a central part within the imaging department and should be a primary consideration of the development of future curricula though not all graduates may utilise these skills

Work-Related Health in Europe: Are Older Workers More at Risk?

This paper uses the fourth European Working Conditions Survey (2005) to address the impact of age on work-related self-reported health outcomes. More specifically, the paper examines whether older workers differ significantly from younger workers regarding their job-related health risk perception, mental and physical health, sickness absence, probability of reporting injury and fatigue. Accounting for the 'healthy worker effect', or sample selection – in so far as unhealthy workers are likely to exit the labour force – we find that as a group, those aged 55-65 years are more 'vulnerable' than younger workers: they are more likely to perceive work-related health and safety risks, and to report mental, physical and fatigue health problems. As previously shown, older workers are more likely to report work-related absence.endogeneity, fatigue, absence, physical health, mental health, healthy worker selection effect

Patient obesity and the practical experience of the plain radiography professional: on everyday ethics, patient positioning and infelicitous equipment

Patient obesity is increasingly placing significant and multifaceted strain upon medical imaging departments, and professionals, in (particularly Western) healthcare systems. The majority of obesity-related studies in radiology are, however, primarily focused only upon the technical business of collecting diagnostically-efficacious images. This study, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), qualitatively explores the everyday clinical experiences of eight expert UK diagnosticians working in plain radiography. Focus herein falls particularly upon (a) problems with patient positioning during examination, and (b) challenges arising around available equipment. In line with extant research, participants reported that difficulties with positioning obese patients could have negative impacts on image quality, and that insufficient table weight limits and widths, and inadequate detector sizes, can adversely affect examination. They also raised some more novel issues, such as how the impact of available gown sizes upon a patient’s sense of dignity can cause practical and ethical dilemmas for a clinician in situ. The issue of how one might ‘train’ experience in positioning patients without bony landmarks as a reference point was also made salient, with strong implications for undergraduate radiography curricula. It is finally highlighted how the participating radiographers themselves seldom conceptualised any given problem as a purely ‘technical’ one, instead recurrently recognising the interlinking of material, socio-economic and moral matters in real healthcare contexts. By better understanding such nuance and complexity as lived by real radiographers, it is contended, a more context-sensitive and flexible path to effective training and guideline-production can be mapped

Charting the practical dimensions of understaffing from a managerial perspective: the everyday shape of the UK’s sonographer shortage

Introduction: Across the last two decades, ultrasound services in many healthcare sectors have become increasingly pressurised as a consequence of upsurging demand and difficulties in recruiting viable clinicians. Indeed by 2013, the UK government's Migration Advisory Committee had listed sonography as an official ‘shortage specialty’. Comparatively little research has to date, however, explored the impacts of this situation upon the departments themselves, and the individuals working therein. The core purpose of this study is, thus, to lend qualitative depth to current understandings of the frontline situation in the UK's ultrasound units, many of which are understaffed, from the perspective of their managers. Methods: Using a thematic analysis informed by a Straussian model of Grounded Theory, N=20 extended accounts provided by ultrasound department leads in public (n=18) and private (n=2) units were explored. Results: Four global themes emerged from the analysis of which the first two (the broadly sociological matters) are described in this paper. Theme 1 addresses how a lack of staff in the broader ultrasound economy has created a troublesome migratory system in contemporary UK ultrasound. Theme 2 addresses how this economy works chiefly to the advantage of the most junior and the most senior clinicians, often leaving mid-career professionals in the borderline impossible situation of having to concurrently occupy both junior and senior roles. Conclusions: The findings ideally open up debate on some key practical contingencies of the UK’s sonographer shortage, and reflect upon literature regarding the nuanced aspects of a shifting healthcare workplace constitution

Retrosynthetic reaction prediction using neural sequence-to-sequence models

We describe a fully data driven model that learns to perform a retrosynthetic reaction prediction task, which is treated as a sequence-to-sequence mapping problem. The end-to-end trained model has an encoder-decoder architecture that consists of two recurrent neural networks, which has previously shown great success in solving other sequence-to-sequence prediction tasks such as machine translation. The model is trained on 50,000 experimental reaction examples from the United States patent literature, which span 10 broad reaction types that are commonly used by medicinal chemists. We find that our model performs comparably with a rule-based expert system baseline model, and also overcomes certain limitations associated with rule-based expert systems and with any machine learning approach that contains a rule-based expert system component. Our model provides an important first step towards solving the challenging problem of computational retrosynthetic analysis