Autism and the right to education in the EU: Policy mapping and scoping review of the United Kingdom, France, Poland and Spain

Introduction: Autistic people may have different educational needs that need to be met to allow them to develop their full potential. Education and disability policies remain within the competence of EU Member States, with current educational standards and provisions for autistic people implemented locally. This scoping review aims to map EU and national special education policies with the goal of scoping the level of fulfilment of the right to education of autistic people. / Methods: Four EU countries (United Kingdom, France, Poland and Spain) were included in this scoping review study. Governmental policies in the field of education, special education needs and disability law were included. Path dependency framework was used for data analysis; a net of inter-dependencies between international, EU and national policies was created. / Results and discussion: Each country created policies where the right to free education without discrimination is provided. Poland does not have an autism specific strategy, whereas the United Kingdom, France and Spain have policies specifically designed for autistic individuals. Within the United Kingdom, all countries created different autism plans, nevertheless all aim to reach the same goal—inclusive education for autistic children that leads to the development of their full potential. / Conclusion: Policy-making across Europe in the field of education has been changing through the years in favour of autistic people. Today their rights are noticed and considered, but there is still room for improvement. Results showed that approaches and policies vastly differ between countries, more Member States should be analysed in a similar manner to gain a broader and clearer view with a special focus on disability rights in Central and Eastern Europe

English for public health teaching within the context of internationalisation in France

book chapter: William Sherlaw, Kasia Czabanowska, Mark Thompson: English for public health teaching within the context of internationalisation in France in Wilkinson, Robert / Walsh, Mary Louise (eds.) Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education From Theory to Practice. Selected papers from the 2013 ICLHE Conference. Peter Lang GmbH Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2015. 341 pp., 1 ISBN 978-3-631-65726-3. Doi: 10.3726/978-3-653-05109-

A Computational Algorithm Associated with Patient Progress Modelling

Mathematical model, Patient progress model, Compartmental model, Differential equations, Health impact assessment,

Policy Makers', NGO, and Healthcare Workers' Accounts of Migrants' and Refugees' Healthcare Access Across Europe—Human Rights and Citizenship Based Claims

Freely available healthcare, universally accessible to the population of citizens, is a key ideal for European welfare systems. As labor migration of the twentieth century gave way to the globalized streams of the twenty-first century, new challenges to fulfilling these ideals have emerged. The principle of freedom of movement, together with large-scale forced migration have led to large scale movements of people, making new demands on European healthcare systems which had previously been largely focused on meeting sedentary local populations' needs. Drawing on interviews with service providers working for NGOs and public healthcare systems and with policy makers across 10 European countries, this paper considers how forced migrants' healthcare needs are addressed by national health systems, with factors hindering access at organizational and individual level in particular focus. The ways in which refugees' and migrants' healthcare access is prevented are considered in terms of claims based on citizenship and on the human right to health and healthcare. Where claims based on citizenship are denied and there is no means of asserting the human right to health, migrants are caught in a new form of inequality. © Copyright © 2020 Bradby, Lebano, Hamed, Gil-Salmerón, Durá-Ferrandis, Garcés-Ferrer, Sherlaw, Christova, Karnaki, Zota and Riza

Methods to assess performance of models estimating risk of death in intensive care patients: a review

Models that estimate the probability of death of intensive care unit patients can be used to stratify patients according to the severity of their condition and to control for casemix and severity of illness. These models have been used for risk adjustment in quality monitoring, administration, management and research and as an aid to clinical decision making. Models such as the Mortality Prediction Model family, SAPS II, APACHE II, APACHE III and the organ system failure models provide estimates of the probability of in-hospital death of ICU patients. This review examines methods to assess the performance of these models. The key attributes of a model are discrimination (the accuracy of the ranking in order of probability of death) and calibration (the extent to which the model's prediction of probability of death reflects the true risk of death). These attributes should be assessed in existing models that predict the probability of patient mortality, and in any subsequent model that is developed for the purposes of estimating these probabilities. The literature contains a range of approaches for assessment which are reviewed and a survey of the methodologies used in studies of intensive care mortality models is presented. The systematic approach used by Standards for Reporting Diagnostic Accuracy provides a framework to incorporate these theoretical considerations of model assessment and recommendations are made for evaluation and presentation of the performance of models that estimate the probability of death of intensive care patients. (author abstract

Performance monitoring in interventional cardiology: Application of statistical process control to a single-site database

Free to read on journal website (may need to create free account first) AIMS: Graphical Statistical Process Control (SPC) tools have been shown to promptly identify significant variations in clinical outcomes in a range of health care settings, but as yet have not been widely applied to performance monitoring in percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). We explored the application of these techniques to a prospective PCI registry at a single site. METHODS AND RESULTS: Baseline clinical and procedural data along with one and twelve month major adverse cardiac event (MACE) details were prospectively collected in relation to 2,697 consecutive PCI procedures (2,417 patients) performed between the 1st January 2003 and the 31st December 2007. We investigated outcome measures which were both clinically relevant and occurred at a sufficient frequency (>1%) to allow valid application of SPC techniques, and found procedural and lesion failure, major postprocedural complications, and one and 12 month MACE to be suitable endpoints. Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) charts, Variable Life-Adjusted Display (VLAD) charts and Funnel Plots were employed in combination to evaluate both group and individual performance on a near "real time" basis. We found that the use of these charts provided complimentary prospective audit of clinical performance to identify variations in group and individual operator performance and to clarify these as either systemic or individual operator-related. We propose a system of integrating SPC tools as a component of the audit function of a PCI unit. CONCLUSIONS: SPC tools have the potential to provide near "real-time" performance monitoring and may allow early detection and intervention in altered performance for both the group and the individual operator. A clinically-integrated system of SPC tools may thus complement and enhance effectiveness of the traditional case-based morbidity and mortality audit

Threat and Oblivion: Interpreting the Silence Over the Spanish Flu (1918–19)

The Spanish influenza epidemic (1918–19) was the biggest demographic disaster in the 20th century and, for some, the greatest epidemic in human history. Despite its enormous worldwide relevance, until recent years there were few studies on this catastrophe. This silence has been usually understood as the result of the competition with another worldwide event—the Great War. In this chapter, based on a social memory approach, we propose some other interpretations. Firstly, the absence of the flu in collective memory is a way of concealing an event that was experienced as a threat to the existing health services and a failure of the medical science of the time. Secondly, in terms of risk perception, the flu has some attributes that justify its lack of notoriety and normalization. Finally, the lack of collective meaning conferred upon the disease makes it easier to understand how Spanish flu survived in family memories as a traumatic event but not in public, national ones. Overall, this paper illustrates how social and cognitive processes can contribute to the oblivion of a disaster.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio