Peoples’ use of, and concerns about, green space networks: A case study of Birchwood, Warrington New Town, UK

Cultural services provided by green space networks and in particular leisure and recreational opportunities are central to the quality of life of those living in urban areas. However, the literature concerned with green space networks has mainly focussed on planning aspects rather than on recreational use. The aim of this study was to evaluate the recreational use of, and concerns about, a naturalistic green space network. The case study location was the naturalistic woodland framework in Birchwood, Warrington, UK, known as Birchwood Forest Park. Non-participant observation and content analysis of local archives were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data. Birchwood Forest Park was used more for leisure activities (52.8%, N = 1,825; i.e. recreation, sports or play) than for utilitarian purposes (47.2%, N = 1,825; i.e. as walking or cycling thoroughfare). However, utilitarian walking (30%, N = 1,825) was the most frequent type of activity observed. The maintenance of the naturalistic woodland framework was the most frequent concern mentioned in the local archives (33.3%, N = 234). This case study suggests that the recreational patterns in, as well as peoples’ concerns about, naturalistic urban landscapes may be a factor of high quality maintenance and associated local aesthetic and cultural perceptions. In developing, planning or managing comprehensive urban green space networks it is important to ensure that natural looking scenes are well maintained and that the local community is culturally connected to such scenes

Good adherence to HAART and improved survival in a community HIV/AIDS treatment and care programme: the experience of The AIDS Support Organization (TASO), Kampala, Uganda

BACKGROUND: Poor adherence to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) may result in treatment failure and death. Most reports of the effect of adherence to HAART on mortality come from studies where special efforts are made to provide HAART under ideal conditions. However, there are few reports of the impact of non-adherence to HAART on mortality from community HIV/AIDS treatment and care programmes in developing countries. We therefore conducted a study to assess the effect of adherence to HAART on survival in The AIDS Support Organization (TASO) community HAART programme in Kampala, Uganda. METHODS: The study was a retrospective cohort of 897 patients who initiated HAART at TASO clinic, Kampala, between May 2004 and December 2006. A total of 7,856 adherence assessments were performed on the data. Adherence was assessed using a combination of self-report and pill count methods. Patients who took 95%. The crude death rate was 12.2 deaths per 100 patient-years, with a rate of 42.5 deaths per 100 patient-years for non-adherent patients and 6.1 deaths per 100 patient-years for adherent patients. Non-adherence to ART was significantly associated with mortality. Patients with a CD4 count of less than 50 cells/mm3 had a higher mortality (HR = 4.3; 95% CI: 2.22-5.56) compared to patients with a CD4 count equal to or greater than 50 cells/mm3 (HR = 2.4; 95% CI: 1.79-2.38). CONCLUSION: Our study showed that good adherence and improved survival are feasible in community HIV/AIDS programmes such as that of TASO, Uganda. However, there is need to support community HAART programmes to overcome the challenges of funding to provide sustainable supplies particularly of antiretroviral drugs; provision of high quality clinical and laboratory support; and achieving a balance between expansion and quality of services. Measures for the early identification and treatment of HIV infected people including home-based VCT and HAART should be strengthened

Your best day: An interactive app to translate how time reallocations within a 24-hour day are associated with health measures

Reallocations of time between daily activities such as sleep, sedentary behavior and physical activity are differentially associated with markers of physical, mental and social health. An individual’s most desirable allocation of time may differ depending on which outcomes they value most, with these outcomes potentially competing with each other for reallocations. We aimed to develop an interactive app that translates how self-selected time reallocations are associated with multiple health measures. We used data from the Australian Child Health CheckPoint study (n = 1685, 48% female, 11–12 y), with time spent in daily activities derived from a validated 24-h recall instrument, %body fat from bioelectric impedance, psychosocial health from the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory and academic performance (writing) from national standardized tests. We created a user-interface to the compositional isotemporal substitution model with interactive sliders that can be manipulated to self-select time reallocations between activities. The time-use composition was significantly associated with body fat percentage (F = 2.66, P < .001), psychosocial health (F = 4.02, P < .001), and academic performance (F = 2.76, P < .001). Dragging the sliders on the app shows how self-selected time reallocations are associated with the health measures. For example, reallocating 60 minutes from screen time to physical activity was associated with -0.8 [95% CI -1.0 to -0.5] %body fat, +1.9 [1.4 to 2.5] psychosocial score and +4.5 [1.8 to 7.2] academic performance. Our app allows the health associations of time reallocations to be compared against each other. Interactive interfaces provide flexibility in selecting which time reallocations to investigate, and may transform how research findings are disseminated

Urban Biodiversity and Landscape Ecology: Patterns, Processes and Planning

Effective planning for biodiversity in cities and towns is increasingly important as urban areas and their human populations grow, both to achieve conservation goals and because ecological communities support services on which humans depend. Landscape ecology provides important frameworks for understanding and conserving urban biodiversity both within cities and considering whole cities in their regional context, and has played an important role in the development of a substantial and expanding body of knowledge about urban landscapes and communities. Characteristics of the whole city including size, overall amount of green space, age and regional context are important considerations for understanding and planning for biotic assemblages at the scale of entire cities, but have received relatively little research attention. Studies of biodiversity within cities are more abundant and show that longstanding principles regarding how patch size, configuration and composition influence biodiversity apply to urban areas as they do in other habitats. However, the fine spatial scales at which urban areas are fragmented and the altered temporal dynamics compared to non-urban areas indicate a need to apply hierarchical multi-scalar landscape ecology models to urban environments. Transferring results from landscape-scale urban biodiversity research into planning remains challenging, not least because of the requirements for urban green space to provide multiple functions. An increasing array of tools is available to meet this challenge and increasingly requires ecologists to work with planners to address biodiversity challenges. Biodiversity conservation and enhancement is just one strand in urban planning, but is increasingly important in a rapidly urbanising world

Cognition

Cognition is one psychological process through which individuals come to know the ENVIRONMENT around them. Environment, in this sense, refers to all events and phenomena external to an individual. Cognition is a broad term that covers activities such as thinking and reasoning. Some writers draw a distinction between PERCEPTION and cognition, seeing perception as the impinging of external stimuli on the human sense organs and cognition as abstract mental activity that involves insight, deduction, imagery, and problem-solving. Such a distinction is somewhat artificial because cognitive factors can influence perception

Putting Community in Place

Community' is a term which is used widely and loosely. People often speak of such things as a 'rural community', a 'migrant community', the 'gay community', 'gated communities' and even 'the community of scholars'. Belonging to a community is seen as overwhelmingly positive. Threats to community are viewed as bad, often implying a loss of social capital. Erosion of community is interpreted by some as a cause of social problems as atomised individuals lose feelings of belonging, are set adrift from social pressure, and pursue self-absorbed goals. The title of Robert Putnam's 'Bowling Alone' vividly captured something of the fear which surrounds the breakdown of community. Governments and citizens are frequently exhorted to create 'stronger communities' in order to counter the erosion of social capital. 'Community development' is thus a worthy field of study in academia and an important area of policy development. In short, communities seem to have 'miraculous properties', leading one media commentator to ask 'who but some sort of sociopath could have anything bad to say about communities?' before going on to observe that 'Community has become a cult, an object of warm-and-fuzzy ritual worship for politicians of all stripes, academics and the rapidly expanding new class of social commentators

Stagnation

Much work in geography and throughout the natural and social sciences in the last fifty years has been preoccupied with the notion of growth. The same is true of contemporary politics where the success or otherwise of governments has often been judged, by the electorate, in terms of the growth which they have been able to deliver. Discussion of economic growth commonly dominates election campaigns. Stagnation is the very opposite of growth. A fixation on growth in contemporary society has meant that relatively little attention has been paid to stagnation. Where it has been considered, it has invariably been treated as a problem and as a failure to develop

A Million Centimetres a Year: Quality newspaper coverage of 'leisure' in Australia

Many claims are made about the emergence of a 'leisure society', some focusing on the so-called 'leisure shock' and others on the 'end of work'. In much of this writing, definition of the core concept of 'leisure' is problematical. Many see leisure as 'time left over' after obligatory commitments have been met. From this perspective, leisure, recreation and tourism are viewed as components of 'leisure time', defined on the basis of the location of the activity in question (home, day trip, overnight stay). This actor-based approach to defining leisure is widely used but has drawbacks. The paper explores an alternative approach. It focuses on how leisure is socially constructed in the media. This is an enormous topic and the paper limits attention to a quantitative content analysis of the coverage of 'leisure' in the main 'news' section of a quality broadsheet (the Sydney Morning Herald) in 2004. Adopting the agenda-setting approach to media impact, the paper gives an insight into the aspects of leisure covered by Australia5 largest selling broadsheet

Social Indicators

While the term 'social democratic' was used by Marxist socialist political groupings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following the split between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions post-1914, the term came to be used as a descriptor of less radical factions on the left. In the 1960s, the term was used to describe the consensus between 'right'- and 'left'- wing groups in liberal democracies (e.g. the Conservative and Labour Parties in Britain) constructed around acceptance of the need for a welfare state, with a mixed economy, progressive taxation, and Keynesian economic strategy. At the end of the 1950s, Daniel Bell was able to argue that the social democratic consensus was so dominant that ideological debate (in the West at least) was over

Stocklist — a study of clinical skills of critical care paramedics in the UK

Introduction The Critical Care Paramedic (CCP) is a relatively new advanced practitioner. CCPs provide advanced clinical skills, knowledge and expertise for primary response and critical care retrieval and transfer. In the UK it is currently an undefined role with no common code of practice, clinical governance or national guidance. The aim of this study was to explore the current use of CCPs and assess the views of a range of stakeholders on the required skills and role development within a British context. Methods A web based survey design was used to collect information on CCP use and views on skills, role and scope of practice. The survey asked questions on current or intended use of CCPs and skills used. Respondents were asked to rate a list of 23 clinical skills on whether they were essential, desirable or irrelevant; importance of a set of standards and statements about the role of CCPs in the ambulance service. Stakeholders approached included ambulance services, professional bodies, charitable organisations and academic departments. Results From 198 invitations there were 141 responses (70%) and 70% were from ambulance trusts. Half of responders said they currently used CCPs. The top 5 essential skills were concerned with airway management. Views on core standards and the CCP role are summarised in the table. Conclusions The survey confirmed the CCP role is currently undefined and used variably in practice. There was agreement on the need for core skills and standards but the nature of these is still a matter for debate. https://emj.bmj.com/content/emermed/32/5/e5.1.full.pdf This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/emermed-2015-204880.1