Psoriasis today: experiences of healthcare and impact on quality of life in a major UK cohort

Aim: To establish how people with psoriasis in the United Kingdom today experience living with their condition including diagnosis, treatment, healthcare provision and impact on daily life. Background: Psoriasis is a debilitating long-term inflammatory skin disease which can result in severe itching, discomfort and soreness, and may be associated with problems beyond the specific symptoms related to the skin. For many it is accompanied by difficult-to-manage treatment regimes, emotional distress and a negative impact on their quality of life and psychosocial functioning. To date there is little published information about the health experiences of people in the United Kingdom with psoriasis. Methods A postal self-administered questionnaire was completed by members of the Psoriasis Association and the responses analysed (n=1564). Findings The findings suggest some similarities to surveys in other nations, but specifically highlighted that patients feel under-informed and are dissatisfied with current treatment regimes. Responses provided an insight into aspects of the condition that treatments should be targeting. Specific areas of negative impact on psychosocial functioning were identified, including the lack of available support for those experiencing emotional distress. The research provides important information about how the care of patients with psoriasis can be improved, especially at primary care level. This includes: improved training in psoriasis knowledge and awareness at general practitioner level and greater use of dermatology specialist nurses in primary care settings; more effective and manageable treatment regimes that target visible areas and general well-being; greater support for emotional distress and psychosocial functioning.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Connecting past, present and future

• Analysis of past technological change shows that people adopt new innovations but mostly use them to maintain existing features of their lives. • Present and future policy in many areas would benefit from greater awareness of how technological change has interacted with individual and familial practices in the past

What is austerity?

This is the edited transcript of a conversation between Rebecca Bramall, editor of this special issue, Jeremy Gilbert, editor of New Formations, and James Meadway, who at the time was chief economist of the New Economics Foundation and is currently advising shadow chancellor of the exchequer John McDonnell in a consultancy capacity. The discussion touches on the different meanings of ‘austerity’ in contemporary political discourse, the history of neoliberal austerity programmes and their political and social effects, the uneven implementation of austerity in the UK, and various other issues in understanding the cultural, social and economic politics of ‘austerity’ in contemporary Britain, today and in the future

Attachment Aware Schools:Working with Families to Enhance Parental Engagement and Home-School Relationships

Background:- Application of attachment theory in school contexts lacks empirical evidence. The Attachment Aware Schools pilot project was commissioned by two Local Authorities in England to improve the educational outcomes of Looked After Children, and to build an evidence base. Informed by attachment research, Attachment Aware Schools programs provide a coherent and integrated theoretical framework, discourse, and practice for all practitioners working with children and young people. Objective:- The primary focus was to provide whole school and targeted attachment-based strategies to support children’s well-being, behaviour, and academic attainment. This paper; however, documents a secondary objective, which was to facilitate collaborative partnerships with families. Method:- As part of the mixed methods approach to the Attachment Aware Schools project, a series of case studies were collected and thematically coded. The case studies were generated by practitioners using an outcomes-based framework. Results:- Although the case study sample size is small (N=10), the case studies presented here illustrate how Attachment Aware Schools programs can promote increased home-school engagement and shared practice between home and school. Outcomes include improved home-school relationships, reductions in behavioral incidents, and improved family dynamics. Conclusion:- Attachment Aware Schools can be a vehicle for facilitating supportive home-school collaborative partnerships with positive outcomes for vulnerable children and young people

Temporal properties of rehearsal in auditory-verbal short-term memory

Subvocal rehearsal, the use of inner speech for the maintenance of phonological material, is thought to play an important role verbal short-term memory (STM). The importance of rehearsal is based largely on indirect measures, as it is difficult to detect and quantify. To address this issue and investigate rehearsal timing, a novel ‘rehearsal-probe’ task was developed. Individuals silently rehearsed an auditory-verbal sequence, responding after an unpredictable probe (tone) by indicating the item currently being rehearsed. The presentation of probes after variable and repeated delays provides item response proportions over time. The data were analysed using a theory-neutral measure of temporal precision; the circular standard deviations of response distributions. The methods were established across seven experiments designed to explore whether timing precision is fixed or resource-limited. Experiment 3 showed that timing precision decreases with increased in memory load. Temporal precision was negatively correlated with auditory-verbal STM span in six experiments, including one designed specifically to examine individual differences. Experiments 6 and 7 investigated timing in developmental language disorders, which are characterized by serial ordering deficits. Adults with dyslexia and children with language impairments showed more temporal imprecision compared to matched controls. These results suggest that temporal precision is limited by shared resources and may play a role in language development. A computational model was also developed to describe the data with four separable temporal properties. The model captured the main characteristics of the data and provided quantitative estimates of each property. In an EEG experiment, event-related responses to item probes were modulated by the contents of rehearsal, and there was increased spectral power at the item rate during sequence presentation and rehearsal, but not baseline, periods. The findings suggest an important role for fine-grained timing information in serial order STM and have broader implications for debates about models of serial order

Temporal precision and the capacity of auditory-verbal short-term memory

The capacity of serially-ordered auditory-verbal short-term memory (AVSTM) is sensitive to the timing of the material to be stored, and both temporal processing and AVSTM capacity are implicated in the development of language. We developed a novel “rehearsal-probe” task to investigate the relationship between temporal precision and the capacity to remember serial order. Participants listened to a sub-span sequence of spoken digits and silently rehearsed the items and their timing during an unfilled retention interval. After an unpredictable delay, a tone prompted report of the item being rehearsed at that moment. An initial experiment showed cyclic distributions of item responses over time, with peaks preserving serial order and broad, overlapping tails. The spread of the response distributions increased with additional memory load and correlated negatively with participants’ auditory digit spans. A second study replicated the negative correlation and demonstrated its specificity to AVSTM by controlling for differences in visuo-spatial STM and nonverbal IQ. The results are consistent with the idea that a common resource underpins both the temporal precision and capacity of AVSTM. The rehearsal-probe task may provide a valuable tool for investigating links between temporal processing and AVSTM capacity in the context of speech and language abilities