Shaping the future for primary care education and training project. Best practise in education and training strategies for integrated health and social care: a benchmarking tool

This tool has been designed to encourage the systematic evaluation of current services offered in your organisation in relation to education and training. The aim of the benchmarking process is to enable your organisation to judge its ability in six domains: team working, communication, role awareness, personal and professional development, practice development and leadership and team working. Associated with each domain are a set of key questions you should ask about your services in relation to evidencebased ‘best practice’. ‘Best’ practice has been identified and summarised through a systematic review of the literature and through consultation with services users and professionals

Explicating the role of partnerships in changing the health and well-being of local communities in urban regeneration areas: An evaluation of the Warnwarth Conceptual Framework for partnership evaluation: A Case Study Approach. Volume 3.

This literature review is one of three outputs from a project: Explicating the role of partnerships in changing the health and well-being of local communities, one of a number of projects in a larger Higher Education Funding Council Strategic Development Fund project (HEFCE) entitled: Urban Regeneration: Making a Difference. This was a collaborative venture between Manchester Metropolitan University, Northumbria University, University of Salford and University of Central Lancashire. Bradford University was an affiliated partner

Shaping the future for primary care education and training project. Best practise in education and training strategies for integrated health and social care: development of a benchmarking tool

Collaboration and partnership working between Higher Education and the NHS is an essential requirement for effective delivery of care (Universities UK 2003). The North West Universities Association (NWUA) and the North West Development Agency (NWDA) are two organisations at the forefront of creating such alliances. The research project, Shaping the Future for Primary Care Education and Training Project is a collaborative partnership between both these organisations and seven North West Higher Education Institutions. In addition, the project brings together for the first time all the key partners in the health, social care and education sectors who are involved in supporting the delivery of integrated health and social care in the North West Region

New frontiers in QLR: definition, design and display

Research that is attentive to temporal processes and durational phenomena is an important tradition within the social sciences internationally with distinct disciplinary trajectories. Qualitative longitudinal research emerged as a distinct methodological paradigm around the turn of the millennium, named within the UK through journal special issues, literature reviews and funding commitments. In 2012-3 the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods funded a network for methodological innovation to map ’New frontiers of QLR’, bringing together a group of scholars who have been actively involved in establishing QLR as a methodological field. The network provided an opportunity to consolidate the learning that has developed in QLR over a sustained period of investment and to engage critically with what QLR might mean in new times. This paper documents the series of discussions staged by the network involving the definition of QLR, the kinds of relationships and practices it involves and the consequences of these in a changing landscape for social research. The series was deliberately interdisciplinary ensuring that we engaged with the temporal perspectives and norms of different academic and practice traditions and this has both enriched and complicated the picture that has emerged from our deliberations. In this paper we argue that QLR is a methodological paradigm that by definition moves with the times, and is an ongoing site of innovation and experiment. Key issues identified for future development in QLR include: intervening in debates of ‘big data’ with visions of deep data that involve following and connecting cases over time; the potential of longitudinal approaches to reframe the ‘sample’ exploring new ways of connecting the particular and the general; new thinking about research ethics that move us beyond anonymity to better explore the meanings of confidentiality and the co-production of research knowledge; and finally the promotion of a QLR sensibility that involves a heightened awareness of the here and now in the making of knowledge, yet which also connects research biographically over a career, enriched by a reflexive understanding of time as a resource in the making of meaning

Development and Flight Results from the C3D2 Imager Payload on AlSat Nano

An experimental CubeSat camera system using 3 separate CMOS imagers was flown in 2014 on UKube-1. In response to an announcement opportunity in December 2014, we proposed an upgrade to our C3D imager payload, which was accepted to fly on AlSat Nano. Launched in September 2016 the system has been operational for over 1 year and has returned both images and housekeeping data, including detailed temperature and radiation dosimetry measurements. Through these in-orbit demonstrations on CubeSans, the image sensors and payload have attained TRL9, and these are now being used in other flight opportunities. In this paper we describe the C3D imager payload, which comprises 3 independent CMOS image sensors used in different camera systems; two wide field cameras are specifically optimised with one to observe the Earth from the 650 km orbit, and the other with its focus set to 40 cm to observe a deployable boom from the CubeSat. The experiment controller also contained thermometry and two RADFET dosimeters, one located on the payload, with the other deployed at a different point on the spacecraft. In this paper we will describe the experiment design and operational performance, and review the in-orbit data obtained during the operations covering over 17 months in-orbit, in addition to discussing lessons learned from the flight experience. We also discuss further developments of the payload concept which we are currently working on toward future flight opportunities

Learning Style Diversity in Post –Secondary Distance Education

During the fall semester of 2005, 153 university graduate students’ preferred learning styles were measured with the Kolb Learning Style Inventory, online version 3.1. The primary findings of the study indicated all of the learning styles and processes described by Kolb were represented in the distance learning population and suggested distance and residential learners uniquely engage the learning process. Biblical references were discussed with respect to the uniqueness displayed by study participants

DNA methylation and socioeconomic status in a Mexican-American birth cohort.

Background: Maternal social environmental stressors during pregnancy are associated with adverse birth and child developmental outcomes, and epigenetics has been proposed as a possible mechanism for such relationships. Methods: In a Mexican-American birth cohort of 241 maternal-infant pairs, cord blood samples were measured for repeat element DNA methylation (LINE-1 and Alu). Linear mixed effects regression was used to model associations between indicators of the social environment (low household income and education, neighborhood-level characteristics) and repeat element methylation. Results from a dietary questionnaire were also used to assess the interaction between maternal diet quality and the social environment on markers of repeat element DNA methylation. Results: After adjusting for confounders, living in the most impoverished neighborhoods was associated with higher cord blood LINE-1 methylation (β = 0.78, 95%CI 0.06, 1.50, p = 0.03). No other neighborhood-, household-, or individual-level socioeconomic indicators were significantly associated with repeat element methylation. We observed a statistical trend showing that positive association between neighborhood poverty and LINE-1 methylation was strongest in cord blood of infants whose mothers reported better diet quality during pregnancy (pinteraction = 0.12). Conclusion: Our findings indicate a small yet unexpected positive association between neighborhood-level poverty during pregnancy and methylation of repetitive element DNA in infant cord blood and that this association is possibly modified by diet quality during pregnancy. However, our null findings for other adverse SES indicators do not provide strong evidence for an adverse association between early-life socioeconomic environment and repeat element DNA methylation in infants

Associations of PON1 and genetic ancestry with obesity in early childhood.

Obesity in children has become an epidemic in the U.S. and is particularly prominent in minority populations such as Mexican-Americans. In addition to physical activity and diet, genetics also plays a role in obesity etiology. A few studies in adults and adolescents suggest a link between obesity and paraoxonase 1 (PON1), a multifunctional enzyme that can metabolize organophosphate pesticides and also has antioxidant properties. We determined PON1192 genotype and arylesterase levels (ARYase, measure of PON1 enzyme quantity), to characterize the relationship between PON1 and obesity in young Mexican-American children (n = 373) living in an agricultural community in California. Since PON1 polymorphisms and obesity both vary between ethnic groups, we estimated proportional genetic ancestry using 106 ancestral informative markers (AIMs). Among children, PON1192 allele frequencies were 0.5 for both alleles, and the prevalence of obesity was high (15% and 33% at ages two and five, respectively). The average proportion of European, African, and Native American ancestry was 0.40, 0.09, and 0.51, yet there was wide inter-individual variation. We found a significantly higher odds of obesity (9.3 and 2.5- fold) in PON1192QQ children compared to PON1192RR children at ages two and five, respectively. Similar relationships were seen with BMI Z-scores at age two and waist circumference at age five. After adjusting for genetic ancestry in models of PON1 and BMI Z-score, effect estimates for PON1192 genotype changed 15% and 9% among two and five year old children, respectively, providing evidence of genetic confounding by population stratification. However even after adjustment for genetic ancestry, the trend of increased BMI Z-scores with increased number of PON1192 Q alleles remained. Our findings suggest that PON1 may play a role in obesity independent of genetic ancestry and that studies of PON1 and health outcomes, especially in admixed populations, should account for differences due to population stratification

Sex differences in DNA methylation assessed by 450 K BeadChip in newborns.

BackgroundDNA methylation is an important epigenetic mark that can potentially link early life exposures to adverse health outcomes later in life. Host factors like sex and age strongly influence biological variation of DNA methylation, but characterization of these relationships is still limited, particularly in young children.MethodsIn a sample of 111 Mexican-American subjects (58 girls , 53 boys), we interrogated DNA methylation differences by sex at birth using the 450 K BeadChip in umbilical cord blood specimens, adjusting for cell composition.ResultsWe observed that ~3% of CpG sites were differentially methylated between girls and boys at birth (FDR P < 0.05). Of those CpGs, 3031 were located on autosomes, and 82.8% of those were hypermethylated in girls compared to boys. Beyond individual CpGs, we found 3604 sex-associated differentially methylated regions (DMRs) where the majority (75.8%) had higher methylation in girls. Using pathway analysis, we found that sex-associated autosomal CpGs were significantly enriched for gene ontology terms related to nervous system development and behavior. Among hits in our study, 35.9% had been previously reported as sex-associated CpG sites in other published human studies. Further, for replicated hits, the direction of the association with methylation was highly concordant (98.5-100%) with previous studies.ConclusionsTo our knowledge, this is the first reported epigenome-wide analysis by sex at birth that examined DMRs and adjusted for confounding by cell composition. We confirmed previously reported trends that methylation profiles are sex-specific even in autosomal genes, and also identified novel sex-associated CpGs in our methylome-wide analysis immediately after birth, a critical yet relatively unstudied developmental window