Community engagement to enhance trust between Gypsy/Travellers, and maternity, early years’ and child dental health services: protocol for a multimethod exploratory study

Gypsy/Travellers have poor health and experience discrimination alongside structural and cultural barriers when accessing health services and consequently may mistrust those services. Our study aims to investigate which approaches to community engagement are most likely to be effective at enhancing trust between Gypsy/Travellers and mainstream health services. Methods This multi-method 30-month study, commenced in June 2015, and comprises four stages. 1. Three related reviews: a) systematic review of Gypsy/Travellers’ access to health services; b) systematic review of reviews of how trust has been conceptualised within healthcare; c) realist synthesis of community engagement approaches to enhance trust and increase Gypsy/Travellers’ participation in health services. The reviews will consider any economic literature; 2. Online consultation with health and social care practitioners, and civil society organisations on existing engagement activities, including perceptions of barriers and good practice; 3. Four in-depth case studies of different Gypsy/Traveller communities, focusing on maternity, early years and child dental health services. The case studies include the views of 32–48 mothers of pre-school children, 32–40 healthcare providers and 8–12 informants from third sector organisations. 4. Two stakeholder workshops exploring whether policy options are realistic, sustainable and replicable. Case study data will be analysed thematically informed by the evaluative framework derived from the realist synthesis in stage one. The main outputs will be: a) an evaluative framework of Gypsy/Travellers’ engagement with health services; b) recommendations for policy and practice; c) evidence on which to base future implementation strategies including estimation of costs. Discussion Our novel multi-method study seeks to provide recommendations for policy and practice that have potential to improve uptake and delivery of health services, and to reduce lifetime health inequalities for Gypsy/Travellers. The findings may have wider resonance for other marginalised populations. Strengths and limitations of the study are discussed

Improving Environmental Justice and Mobility in Southeast Los Angeles

CCRP0017This case study is part of the Climate Smart Transportation and Communities Consortium (CSTACC), case studies that were conducted in various locations throughout the state to analyze environmental justice issues in low income, communities of color. This study took place in southeast Los Angeles County in partnership with the Southeast Los Angeles Collaborative (SELAC), a non-profit community-based umbrella organization representing 8 cities and several unincorporated areas. The case study has two parts. The first part examines impacts of heavy duty trucks and finds the main problems to be traffic safety and particulate emissions. An analysis of regional freight traffic reveals that current and planned regulations to achieve zero emission truck targets will significantly reduce truck-related emissions. A local analysis showed higher than average truck involved crashes and safety hot spots. Local traffic management strategies are recommended to increase safety. The second part examines public transit job accessibility. Transit accessibility depends on both service level and access to bus stops. Reductions in service that took place as a result of the pandemic greatly reduced job access. Recommendations include exploring bike share and car share options to reduce travel times to and from bus stops, and restoring service to pre-pandemic levels

Transactions costs in rural decision-making: The cases of funding and monitoring in rural development in England

Public domain decisions in rural England have become more complex as the number of stakeholders having a say in them has increased. Transactions costs can be used to explore this increasing complexity. The size and distribution of these costs are higher in rural areas. Grouping transactions costs into four - organizations, belief systems, knowledge and information, and institutions - two of the latter are evaluated empirically: growth in the bid culture, and monitoring and evaluation. Amongst 65 Agents of Rural Governance (ARGs) in Gloucestershire, both were found to be increasing over time, but those relating to finance were a greater burden than those of monitoring: the latter can improve ARG performance. Increasing transactions costs in rural decision-making appears to be at variance with ambitions of achieving 'smaller government' through, for example, the Big Society. Smaller government is likely to be shifting the incidence of these costs, rather than reducing them. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

UNderstanding uptake of Immunisations in TravellIng aNd Gypsy communities (UNITING): a qualitative interview study

Background: Gypsies, Travellers and Roma (referred to as Travellers) are less likely to access health services, including immunisation. To improve immunisation rates, we need to understand what helps and hinders individuals in these communities in taking up immunisations. Aims: (1) Investigate the barriers to and facilitators of acceptability and uptake of immunisations among six Traveller communities across four UK cities; and (2) identify possible interventions to increase uptake of immunisations in these Traveller communities that could be tested in a subsequent feasibility study. Methods: Three-phase qualitative study underpinned by the social ecological model. Phase 1: interviews with 174 Travellers from six communities: Romanian Roma (Bristol); English Gypsy/Irish Traveller (Bristol); English Gypsy (York); Romanian/Slovakian Roma (Glasgow); Scottish Showpeople (Glasgow); and Irish Traveller (London). Focus on childhood and adult vaccines. Phase 2: interviews with 39 service providers. Data were analysed using the framework approach. Interventions were identified using a modified intervention mapping approach. Phase 3: 51 Travellers and 25 service providers attended workshops and produced a prioritised list of potentially acceptable and feasible interventions. Results: There were many common accounts of barriers and facilitators across communities, particularly across the English-speaking communities. Scottish Showpeople were the most similar to the general population. Roma communities experienced additional barriers of language and being in a new country. Men, women and service providers described similar barriers and facilitators. There was widespread acceptance of childhood and adult immunisation, with current parents perceived as more positive than their elders. A minority of English-speaking Travellers worried about multiple/combined childhood vaccines, adult flu and whooping cough. Cultural concerns about vaccines offered during pregnancy and about human papillomavirus were most evident in the Bristol English Gypsy/Irish Traveller community. Language, literacy, discrimination, poor school attendance, poverty and housing were identified by Travellers and service providers as barriers for some. Trustful relationships with health professionals were important and continuity of care was valued. A few English-speaking Travellers described problems of booking and attending for immunisation. Service providers tailored their approach to Travellers, particularly the Roma. Funding cuts, NHS reforms and poor monitoring challenged their work. Five ‘top-priority’ interventions were agreed across communities and service providers to improve the immunisation among Travellers who are housed or settled on an authorised site: (1) cultural competence training for health professionals and frontline staff; (2) identification of Travellers in health records to tailor support and monitor uptake; (3) provision of a named frontline person in general practitioner practices to provide respectful and supportive service; (4) flexible and diverse systems for booking appointments, recall and reminders; and (5) protected funding for health visitors specialising in Traveller health, including immunisation. Limitations: No Travellers living on the roadside or on unofficial encampments were interviewed. We should exert caution in generalising to these groups. Future work: To include development, implementation and evaluation of a national policy plan (and practice guidance plan) to promote the uptake of immunisation among Traveller communities

From the Sum of Near-Zero Energy Buildings to the Whole of a Near-Zero Energy Housing Settlement: The Role of Communal Spaces in Performance-Driven Design

Almost a century ago Modernism challenged the structure of the city and reshaped its physical space in order to, amongst other things, accommodate new transportation infrastructure and road networks proclaiming the,nowadays much-debated ‘scientificated’ pursuit of efficiency for the city. This transformation has had a great impact on the way humans still design, move in, occupy and experience the city. Today major cities in Europe, such as Paris and London, are considering banning vehicles from their historic centers. In parallel, significant effort is currently underway internationally by designers, architects, and engineers to integrate innovative technologies and sophisticated solutions for energy production, management, and storage, as well as for efficient energy consumption, into the architecture of buildings. In general, this effort seeks for new technologies and design methods (e.g., DesignBuilder with EnergyPlus simulation engine; Rhicoceros3D with Grasshopper plugin and Ecotect, Radiance and EnergyPlus tools) that would enable a holistic approach to the spatial design of Near-Zero Energy buildings, so that their ecological benefits are an added value to the architectural design and a building’s visual, and material, impact on its surrounding space. The paper inquires how the integration of such technological infrastructure and performance-orientated interfaces changes yet again the structure and form of cities, and to what extent it safeguards social rights and enables equal access to common resources. Drawing from preliminary results and initial considerations of ongoing research that involve the construction of four innovative NZE settlements across Europe, in the context of the EU-funded ZERO-PLUS project, this paper discusses the integration of novel infrastructure in communal spaces of these settlements. In doing so, it contributes to the debate about smart communities and their role in the sustainable management of housing developments and settlements that are designed and developed with the concept of smart territories

Illinois (mobile app)

<p>The Illinois app is the official campus app of the University of Illinois. The Illinois app is powered by the <a href="http://rokwire.org/">Rokwire</a> software platform.</p> <p>The Rokwire project is an effort of the <a href="https://rokwire.org/smart-healthy-communities-initiative/">Smart, Healthy Communities Initiative</a> funded by the Office of the Provost at the University of Illinois.</p&gt

Measurement and Evaluation of Smart City Outcomes for Smarter Governance

Global urbanization trends are associated with a proliferation of smart city developments enabled by advanced Information and Communication Technologies designed to address contemporary challenges and develop innovative solutions in cities and regions. This chapter sets out to examine the relationship between smart city development and smart governance, both the contribution of governance to smart city development and its potential benefits for city governance. Building on an analysis of research on UK smart city case studies, this chapter argues that the contribution of smart city developments and their success outcomes to governance is influenced by how cities address the challenges of measurement and evaluation of smart city developments

Their influence of pack design on gateroad stability under differing geological conditions and mining methods

Research carried out under with finacial aid from the European Coal and Steel CommunityAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:3828.4F(EUR--11111-EN) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

NY Statewide Behavioral Equity Impact Decision Support Tool with Replica

69A3551747119A NY statewide model choice model is developed to deterministically fit heterogeneous coefficients for trips along each census block-group OD pair conducted by each population segment within a random-utility-consistent framework. The proposed approach is to use inverse optimization (IO) to derive coefficients for each OD pair times population segment as an agent. This is only possible with ubiquitous population data. We call this a group-level agent-based mixed logit (g-AMXL) model, which is an extension of the AMXL model proposed by Ren and Chow (2022). The significance of g-AMXL is as follows. First, g-AMXL takes OD level (instead of individual level) trip data as inputs, which is efficient in dealing with ubiquitous datasets containing millions of observations. Second, preference heterogeneities are based on non-parametric aggregation of coefficients per agent instead of having to assume a distributional fit. Third, since each agent\u2019s representative utility function is fully specified, g-AMXL can be directly integrated into system design optimization models as constraints instead of dealing with simulation-based approaches required by mixed logit (MXL) models