More than words can say; Why health and social care policy makers should reconsider their position on informal interpreters

In the UK, individuals with limited English-language proficiency (LEP) self-report poorer health and face challenges accessing health and social care support. Health and social care policies in English speaking countries provide practitioners with guidance that ensures access to public service interpreters for individuals who require them. The guidance simultaneously discourages the use of informal language brokers, including family and friends, suggesting that they are not educated or objective enough to conduct this role, and that they present unmanageable risks. This poses a challenge, as research exploring patient and service user choices, finds that individuals consistently prefer an informal language broker. The paper explores the contradiction between a legislative shift towards empowerment and choice within social work and the policies that restrict these rights in relation to interpretation. Exploring these challenges with a focus on policy and practice, leads to the suggestion that individuals should be empowered to choose who provides their language support. In contrast, existing policies increase the power imbalance between professionals and users of services, significantly affecting the life chances of those with LEP

CropSight: A scalable and open-source information management system for distributed plant phenotyping and IoT-based crop management

Background: High-quality plant phenotyping and climate data lay the foundation of phenotypic analysis and genotype-environment interaction, providing important evidence not only for plant scientists to understand the dynamics between crop performance, genotypes, and environmental factors, but also for agronomists and farmers to closely monitor crops in fluctuating agricultural conditions. With the rise of Internet of Things technologies (IoT) in recent years, many IoT-based remote sensing devices have been applied to plant phenotyping and crop monitoring, which are generating terabytes of biological datasets every day. However, it is still technically challenging to calibrate, annotate, and aggregate the big data effectively, especially when they were produced in multiple locations, at different scales. Findings: CropSight is a PHP and SQL based server platform, which provides automated data collation, storage, and information management through distributed IoT sensors and phenotyping workstations. It provides a two-component solution to monitor biological experiments through networked sensing devices, with interfaces specifically designed for distributed plant phenotyping and centralised data management. Data transfer and annotation are accomplished automatically though an HTTP accessible RESTful API installed on both device-side and server-side of the CropSight system, which synchronise daily representative crop growth images for visual-based crop assessment and hourly microclimate readings for GxE studies. CropSight also supports the comparison of historical and ongoing crop performance whilst different experiments are being conducted. Conclusions: As a scalable and open-source information management system, CropSight can be used to maintain and collate important crop performance and microclimate datasets captured by IoT sensors and distributed phenotyping installations. It provides near real-time environmental and crop growth monitoring in addition to historical and current experiment comparison through an integrated cloud-ready server system. Accessible both locally in the field through smart devices and remotely in an office using a personal computer, CropSight has been applied to field experiments of bread wheat prebreeding since 2016 and speed breeding since 2017. We believe that the CropSight system could have a significant impact on scalable plant phenotyping and IoT-style crop management to enable smart agricultural practices in the near future

Drugs foresight 2020: a Delphi expert panel study

Peer reviewe

Reliable, resilient and sustainable urban drainage systems: an analysis of robustness under deep uncertainty (article)

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Chemical Society via the DOI in this record.The dataset associated with this article is available in ORE at: https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.563Reliability, resilience and sustainability are key goals of any urban drainage system. However, only a few studies have recently focused on measuring, operationalizing and comparing such concepts in a world of deep uncertainty. In this study, these key concepts are defined and quantified for a number of gray, green and hybrid strategies, aimed at improving the capacity issues of an existing integrated urban wastewater system. These interventions are investigated by means of a regret-based approach, which evaluates the robustness (that is the ability to perform well under deep uncertainty conditions) of each strategy in terms of the three qualities through integration of multiple objectives (i.e. sewer flooding, river water quality, combined sewer overflows, river flooding, greenhouse gas emissions, cost and acceptability) across four different future scenarios. The results indicate that strategies found to be robust in terms of sustainability were typically also robust for resilience and reliability across future scenarios. However, strategies found to be robust in terms of their resilience and, in particular, for reliability did not guarantee robustness for sustainability. Conventional gray infrastructure strategies were found to lack robustness in terms of sustainability due to their unbalanced economic, environmental and social performance. Such limitations were overcome, however, by implementing hybrid solutions that combine green retrofits and gray rehabilitation solutions.This study was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through STREAM (EP/G037094/1) with Northumbrian Water Limited, BRIM (EP/N010329/1) and the final author’s fellowship Safe & SuRe (EP/K006924/1)

Social capital theory: a cross-cutting analytic for teacher/therapist work in integrating children's services?

Reviewing relevant policy, this article argues that the current 'integration interlude' is concerned with reformation of work relations to create new forms of 'social capital'. The conceptual framework of social capital has been used by government policy-makers and academic researchers to examine different types, configurations and qualities of relationships, including professional relations, and how these may function as resources. Focusing on the co-work of teachers and speech and language therapists, this analysis introduces social capital as a means of understanding the impact of integrating children's services on professional practitioner groups and across agencies. Social capital theory is compared to alternative theoretical perspectives such as systems and discourse theories and explored as an analytic offering a multi-level typology and conceptual framework for understanding the effects of policy and governance on interprofessional working and relationships. A previous application of social capital theory in a literature review is introduced and analysed, and instances of the additionality provided by a social capital analysis is offered. The article concludes that amongst the effects of current policy to re-design children's services are the reconstruction of professionals' knowledge/s and practices, so it is essential that such policy processes that have complex and far-reaching effects are transparent and coherent. It is also important that new social capital relations in children's services are produced by groups representative of all involved, importantly including those practitioner groups charged in policy to work differently together in future integrated services

Joining the dots: Day to day challenges for practitioners in delivering integrated dementia care

Despite the increasing policy focus on integrated dementia care in the UK, little is known about the opportunities and challenges encountered by practitioners charged with implementing these policies on the ground. We undertook an extensive, mixed‐methods analysis of how a contemporary multidisciplinary dementia pathway in the UK was experienced and negotiated by service providers. Our pragmatic mixed methods design incorporated three types of research interaction with practitioners: (a) Semi‐structured interviews (n = 31) and focus group discussions (n = 4), (b) Practitioner ‘shadowing’ observations (n = 19), and (c) Service attendance and performance metrics reviews (n = 8). Through an abductive analysis of practitioner narratives and practice observations, we evidenced how inter‐practitioner prejudices, restrictive and competitive commissioning frameworks, barriers to effective data sharing and other resource constraints, all challenged integrative dementia care and led to unintended consequences such as practice overlap and failure to identify and respond to people's needs. In order to more successfully realise integrated dementia pathways, we propose innovative commissioning frameworks which purposefully seek to diffuse power imbalances, encourage inter‐provider respect and understanding, and determine clear lines of responsibility

Importance of non-CO2 emissions in carbon management

Background: GHG budgets highlight a need for urgency, yet analyses are often CO2-focused, with less attention paid to non-CO2. Results: In this paper, scenarios are used to explore non-CO2 drivers and barriers to their mitigation, drawing out implications for CO2 management. Results suggest that even optimistic technological and consumption-related developments lead to on-going increases in global N2O, largely to improve food security within a changing climate. This contrasts with existing analysis, where lower levels of N2O by 2050 are projected. Conclusions: As avoiding '2°C' limits the emissions budget, constraints on reducing non-CO2 add pressure to energy system decarbonization. Overlooking how a changing climate and rising consumption restricts efforts to curb non-CO2 will result in policies aiming to avoid 2°C falling short of the mark