Getting back to connectedness: an exploration of a team reflective practice group in a personality disorder service

Staff who work in emotionally challenging environments require time and space for team-based reflection to support their wellbeing and the standards of care they provide. This is particularly true for staff working with clients with a personality disorder diagnosis. These staff can experience powerful feelings and behaviours and respond with defensive practices and/or withdrawal. These reactions to the psychological disturbance encountered can manifest at an individual staff, team and organisational level. Staff support groups (SSGs) are often employed to reduce staff distress and address team dynamics across a broad range of fields (including health, mental health, social care), however to date there is a paucity of research examining staff experiences of these groups. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, a cooperative inquiry was undertaken with a team of 7 psychological therapists and 1 psychiatrist who attended a weekly, externally facilitated SSG as part of their work in an NHS personality disorder service. A theory of ‘connectedness’ was developed through a systematic analysis of the data. Connectedness was derived through the emergence of 7 inter-related actions occurring within the SSG: (1) Security and danger (2) Emotional awareness and obscurity (3) Relational witnessing and turning away (4) Integrating and splitting (5) Belonging and isolation (6) Developing a therapeutic atmosphere (7) Energising and depleting. These actions are represented within a higher order model, delineating the processes that are included in each of these relational domains. The findings are discussed in relation to the unconscious manifestations of attachment trauma at service-user, staff, team and organisation levels. These can be understood as a systemic propensity for disconnectedness as a means to manage overwhelming experience. It is proposed that an SSG provides a critically needed reflective space to re-introduce connectedness back into this disturbed relational context. The implications for group reflective practices that support staff to remain meaningfully engaged in their work are explored

On the hopping pattern design for D2D discovery with invariant

In this paper, we focus on the hopping pattern design for device-to-device (D2D) discovery. The requirements of hopping pattern is discussed, where the impact of specific system constraints, e.g., frequency hopping, is also taken into consideration. Specifically speaking, we discover and utilize the novel feature of resource hopping, i.e., "hopping invariant" to design four new hopping patterns and analyze their performance. The hopping invariant can be used to deliver information for specific users without extra radio resources, and due to the connection between hopping invariant and resource location, receiver complexity can be significantly reduced. Furthermore, our schemes are designed to be independent of discovery frame number, which makes them more suitable to be implemented in practical systems

Fluctuation-Stimulated Variable-Range Hopping

Qualitatively new transport mechanism is suggested for hopping of carriers according to which the variable-range hopping (VRH) arises from the resonant tunneling between transport states brought into resonance by Coulomb potentials produced by surrounding sites with fluctuating occupations. A semiquantitative description of the hopping transport is given based on the assumption that fluctuations of energies of hopping sites have spectral density 1/f

A generic multibody simulation

Described is a dynamic simulation package which can be configured for orbital test scenarios involving multiple bodies. The rotational and translational state integration methods are selectable for each individual body and may be changed during a run if necessary. Characteristics of the bodies are determined by assigning components consisting of mass properties, forces, and moments, which are the outputs of user-defined environmental models. Generic model implementation is facilitated by a transformation processor which performs coordinate frame inversions. Transformations are defined in the initialization file as part of the simulation configuration. The simulation package includes an initialization processor, which consists of a command line preprocessor, a general purpose grammar, and a syntax scanner. These permit specifications of the bodies, their interrelationships, and their initial states in a format that is not dependent on a particular test scenario

In the Wake of a Veto: What Do Oregon Psychologists Think and Know about Prescription Privileges for Psychologists?

Clinical psychology continues to grapple with a contentious debate surrounding prescriptive authority. With over half of all states having considered legislating prescriptive authority, an immense amount of time and money has been invested. This study aims to assess knowledge and attitudes of licensed psychologists in Oregon following a veto that prevented it from becoming the third state with prescription privileges for psychologists. From a list of 1,318 licensed Oregon clinical psychologists, 60% were randomly selected to participate. Of the 130 participants invited thus far, 83 have completed the survey, yielding a respectable response rate (64%). Perceived familiarity with current training models revealed lacking awareness with 75.2% and 72% expressing they were not familiar with the DOD and APA models, respectively. Only 5% knew which three states/territories currently have prescriptive authority and 77% were unfamiliar with any of the three prerequisites for postdoctoral training in psychopharmacology. Arguments in favor of prescription privileges garnering the most support related to perceptions of improved access and treatment enhancement. In contrast, the strongest arguments against prescription privileges involved professional issues (e.g., altered identity). Reflecting division, 43.9% were in favor, 20.7% were undecided, and 36% were in opposition to broadening privileges for psychologists. However, only 15.9% expressed interest in completing training and only 7.2% plan to pursue training and become a prescriber. Overall, these findings suggest legislative efforts should be mindful of the controversy within the field and the low numbers of professionals interested in pursuing prescription privileges, which undercut arguments for improved access and care