Building a Model and Framework for Child Welfare Supervision

This report, Building a Model and Framework for Child Welfare Supervision, presents the findings from an extensive review of the most recent literature combined with interviews of experts in the field of child welfare, currently practicing child welfare administrators, supervisors, frontline practitioners, and trainers. The report is organized into three sections: • Section I introduces seven elements of an emerging model of supervision in child welfare. • Section II presents an integrated organizational framework consisting of four components required to empower child welfare supervisors to effectively carry out their administrative, educational, and supportive functions. • Section III incorporates supports useful to agencies in implementing the recommendations contained in this report. These include our interview protocols, the annotated results of our extensive literature review, a sample job description, and our methodology

New Americans: Child Care Decision-Making of Refugee and Immigrant Parents of English Language Learners

The immigrant and refugee communities in the United States continue to increase. Denver, Colorado and Portland, Maine are two U.S. cities that reflect the changing demographics across the country. As these cities evolve and adjust to serve new populations, it becomes necessary to rethink deep-rooted culturally constructed patterns and traditions that do not take into account the beliefs and practices of these new cultures. One such tradition is child care. Because of the important link between preschool experiences and later school success, understanding refugee and immigrant families’ beliefs and decisions about child care is extremely important. From a policy perspective, understanding these beliefs can guide professional development training for child care providers serving these linguistically and culturally diverse families

Children at Risk in the Child Welfare System: Collaborations to Promote School Readiness - Final Report

This study examines the degree to which key players in the child welfare, early intervention/preschool special education (EI/Preschool SPED) and early care and education (ECE) systems (e.g. Head Start, preschool, child care centers, family child care homes) collaborate to meet the developmental needs of children ages 0 to 5 who are involved in the child welfare system. This research includes an analysis of data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Wellbeing (NSCAW) as well as a case study in Colorado involving interviews with key stakeholders and statewide surveys of caseworkers and foster parents

Child Care and Children With Special Needs: Challenges for Low Income Families [Report]

Findings from this mixed methods study include: Parents of young children with special needs face significant challenges finding and keeping child care arrangements for their child. Parents report significant problems with the child care arrangements they have used for their child with special needs. There are significant programmatic and financial barriers to supporting parents of children with special needs so they can work, and balance work and family. The combination of all of these problems and the particular demands of caring for a child with special needs often result in employment problems and job instability. Families of children with special needs face more economic difficulties (poverty, food and rent insecurity, lack of health insurance) than do families of children without special needs. Certain types of disabilities have a greater impact on the number of child care and work problems than others. Having a child with multiple special needs or having more than one child with special needs significantly increases the likelihood of employment difficulties and job instability

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Diagnosis of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest by Emergency Medical Dispatch : a diagnostic systematic review

Introduction Cardiac arrest is a time-sensitive condition requiring urgent intervention. Prompt and accurate recognition of cardiac arrest by emergency medical dispatchers at the time of the emergency call is a critical early step in cardiac arrest management allowing for initiation of dispatcher-assisted bystander CPR and appropriate and timely emergency response. The overall accuracy of dispatchers in recognizing cardiac arrest is not known. It is also not known if there are specific call characteristics that impact the ability to recognize cardiac arrest. Methods We performed a systematic review to examine dispatcher recognition of cardiac arrest as well as to identify call characteristics that may affect their ability to recognize cardiac arrest at the time of emergency call. We searched electronic databases for terms related to “emergency medical dispatcher”, “cardiac arrest’, and “diagnosis,” among others, with a focus on studies that allowed for calculating diagnostic test characteristics (e.g. sensitivity and specificity). The review was consistent with Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) method for evidence evaluation. Results We screened 2520 article titles, resulting in 47 studies included in this review. There was significant heterogeneity between studies with a high risk of bias in 18 of the 47 which precluded performing meta-analyses. The reported sensitivities for cardiac arrest recognition ranged from 0.46 to 0.98 whereas specificities ranged from 0.32 to 1.00. There were no obvious differences in diagnostic accuracy between different dispatching criteria/algorithms or with the level of education of dispatchers. Conclusion The sensitivity and specificity of cardiac arrest recognition at the time of emergency call varied across dispatch centres and did not appear to differ by dispatch algorithm/criteria used or education of the dispatcher, although comparisons were hampered by heterogeneity across studies. Future efforts should focus on ways to improve sensitivity of cardiac arrest recognition to optimize patient care and ensure appropriate and timely resource utilizatio

2019 International Consensus on Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care Science With Treatment Recommendations

The International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation has initiated a continuous review of new, peer-reviewed, published cardiopulmonary resuscitation science. This is the third annual summary of the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation International Consensus on Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care Science With Treatment Recommendations. It addresses the most recent published resuscitation evidence reviewed by International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation Task Force science experts. This summary addresses the role of cardiac arrest centers and dispatcher-assisted cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the role of extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation in adults and children, vasopressors in adults, advanced airway interventions in adults and children, targeted temperature management in children after cardiac arrest, initial oxygen concentration during resuscitation of newborns, and interventions for presyncope by first aid providers. Members from 6 International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation task forces have assessed, discussed, and debated the certainty of the evidence on the basis of the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation criteria, and their statements include consensus treatment recommendations. Insights into the deliberations of the task forces are provided in the Justification and Evidence to Decision Framework Highlights sections. The task forces also listed priority knowledge gaps for further research

The Somatic Genomic Landscape of Chromophobe Renal Cell Carcinoma

We describe the landscape of somatic genomic alterations of 66 chromophobe renal cell carcinomas (ChRCCs) based on multidimensional and comprehensive characterization, including mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and whole genome sequencing. The result is consistent that ChRCC originates from the distal nephron compared to other kidney cancers with more proximal origins. Combined mtDNA and gene expression analysis implicates changes in mitochondrial function as a component of the disease biology, while suggesting alternative roles for mtDNA mutations in cancers relying on oxidative phosphorylation. Genomic rearrangements lead to recurrent structural breakpoints within TERT promoter region, which correlates with highly elevated TERT expression and manifestation of kataegis, representing a mechanism of TERT up-regulation in cancer distinct from previously-observed amplifications and point mutations