Spending Out - Making It Happen

While it may be of interest to a wider audience, this companion guide is focused on the practicalities of spending out and targeted at those foundations that have decided this is the path for them. By sharing the practical experience of those who are well into the process or have already completed it, we hope to make it easier for others wishing to follow in their footsteps

New Orleans Ten Years After The Storm: The Kaiser Family Foundation Katrina Survey Project

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast and the subsequent levee failure led to unprecedented destruction in New Orleans, the Kaiser Family Foundation teamed up with NPR to conduct a survey of the city's current residents. This work builds on three previous surveys conducted by the Foundation in 2006, 2008, and 2010, as well as a survey of Katrina evacuees in Houston shelters conducted in partnership with the Washington Post in September 2005. The new survey examines how those who are currently living in Orleans Parish feel about the progress the city has made and the lingering challenges it faces, including those brought about by Katrina and those that pre-date the storm.Overall, the survey paints a portrait of a city whose residents are remarkably optimistic, resilient, and proud of their city's culture. On many fronts, residents' reports of conditions in their own neighborhoods and their evaluations of the city's progress in recovery have improved steadily over the 10-year period since the storm. But in this city where racial disparities in income and employment existed long before Katrina, the survey finds that most of these improvements have been unevenly distributed by race. African Americans continue to lag far behind whites, both in their perceptions of how much progress has been made and in the rates at which they report continuing struggles

Making the case for unrestricted funding: A summary of key points for foundation staff and Boards

This briefing summaries the key points from IVAR research to help grantmakers and Boards to consider and make the case for unrestricted funding. The evidence is clear and compelling: the preference for restricted funding rests on familiarity, not evidence. While restricted funding can be the right choice, it has not earned its place as the dominant model.  Perceived barriers should not deter a change that presents value to both charities and funders. In this short briefing, we lay out the value of unrestricted funding, consolidated from our research to date, to help grantmakers and board members clearly consider and make the case for unrestricted funding: both in their organisations and to colleagues in the sector

Opening closed doors: a micro analytic investigation of dispute resolution in child contact cases

Full Research Report ESRC End of Award Report, RES-000-22-2646. Swindon: ESRCThe family courts face intense criticism about decisions made about child contact (or access) following parental separation or divorce. Both father's rights groups and Women's Aid have raised concerns about institutional bias, ineffectiveness and a lack of transparency. However, the inherently closed nature of decision-making in the family courts has prevented greater understanding of how decisions are reached. This study addresses this gap by undertaking a detailed analysis of in-court conciliation meetings where parents negotiate over contact with the assistance of a judge or court social worker. The research uses conversation analysis to explore precisely how the actual, real-time work of family courts is undertaken in and through the communicative processes of spoken interaction. The study will explore, for example, the interactional processes by which agreements are achieved, negotiated and/or impeded, and how the rights and needs of children and parents are discursively framed by conciliators and disputants.Research supported by ESRC grant RES-000-22-264

A palliative care link nurse programme in Mulago Hospital, Uganda: an evaluation using mixed methods

BACKGROUND: Integrating palliative care (PC) and empowering the health care workforce is essential to achieve universal access to PC services. In 2010, 46 % of patients in Mulago Hospital, Uganda had a life limiting illness, of whom 96 % had PC needs. The university/hospital specialist PC unit (Makerere/Mulago Palliative Care Unit –MPCU) implemented a link-nurse model to empower hospital nurses to provide generalist PC. Over two years, 27 link nurses were trained and mentored and 11 clinical protocols developed. The aim of the study was to evaluate the impact of the palliative care link nurse programme at Mulago Hospital METHODS: An evaluation approach utilising mixed methods was used integrating qualitative and quantitative data including: pre and post course assessment confidence ratings; course evaluation forms; audit of clinical guidelines availability; review of link-nurse activity sheets/action plans; review of MPCU patient documentation; Most Significant Change (MSC); individual and focus group interviews. RESULTS: A significant difference was seen in nurses’ confidence after the training (p < 0.001). From July 2012 to December 2013, link nurses identified 2447 patients needing PC, of whom they cared for 2113 (86 %) and referred 334 (14 %) to MPCU. Clinical guidelines/protocols were utilised in 50 % of wards. Main themes identified include: change in attitude; developing new skills and knowledge; change in relationships; improved outcomes of care, along with the challenges that they experienced in integrating PC. Since the start of the programme there has been an increase in PC patients seen at the hospital (611 in 2011 to 1788 in 2013). CONCLUSION: The link-nurse programme is a practical model for integrating PC into generalist services. Recommendations have been made for ongoing development and expansion of the programme as an effective health systems strengthening approach in similar healthcare contexts, as well as the improvement in medical and nursing education

Telomerecat: A ploidy-agnostic method for estimating telomere length from whole genome sequencing data.

Telomere length is a risk factor in disease and the dynamics of telomere length are crucial to our understanding of cell replication and vitality. The proliferation of whole genome sequencing represents an unprecedented opportunity to glean new insights into telomere biology on a previously unimaginable scale. To this end, a number of approaches for estimating telomere length from whole-genome sequencing data have been proposed. Here we present Telomerecat, a novel approach to the estimation of telomere length. Previous methods have been dependent on the number of telomeres present in a cell being known, which may be problematic when analysing aneuploid cancer data and non-human samples. Telomerecat is designed to be agnostic to the number of telomeres present, making it suited for the purpose of estimating telomere length in cancer studies. Telomerecat also accounts for interstitial telomeric reads and presents a novel approach to dealing with sequencing errors. We show that Telomerecat performs well at telomere length estimation when compared to leading experimental and computational methods. Furthermore, we show that it detects expected patterns in longitudinal data, repeated measurements, and cross-species comparisons. We also apply the method to a cancer cell data, uncovering an interesting relationship with the underlying telomerase genotype

Publisher Correction: Telomerecat: A ploidy-agnostic method for estimating telomere length from whole genome sequencing data.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper

A framework for housing in the London Thames Gateway

This CASEbrief is an executive summary of 'A framework for housing in the London Thames Gateway', a 3 volume report by LSE Housing and Enterprise LSE Cities (Anne Power, Liz Richardson, Kelly Seshimo, Kathryn Firth, with Philipp Rode, Christine Whitehead and Tony Travers). The report makes recommendations on how to sustainably develop the London Thames Gateway area

A framework for housing in the London Thames gateway: executive summary

This CASEbrief is an executive summary of 'A framework for housing in the London Thames Gateway', a 3 volume report by LSE Housing and Enterprise LSE Cities (Anne Power, Liz Richardson, Kelly Seshimo, Kathryn Firth, with Philipp Rode, Christine Whitehead and Tony Travers). The report makes recommendations on how to sustainably develop the London Thames Gateway area