Partnership,Service Needs and Assessing Competence in Post Qualifying Education and Training

Education and training must extend beyond initial qualifying courses into post qualifying professional development throughout a social worker's career if practice is to be most effective in meeting clients' needs. In the United Kingdom a Framework for Post Qualifying Education and Training was introduced from 1990. Revised frameworks have been put in place from autumn 2007 in each of the four home countries of the UK. This paper reflects on lessons learned in implementing these post qualifying frameworks in Northern Ireland. Within the overarching theme of relevance to practice, issues are drawn out under three main themes: (1) partnership working between employers and universities including the importance of leadership from policy makers and senior managers; (2) assessing competence including providing an Independent Assessment Route to increase access and to benchmark professional standards; and (3) meeting service needs including specifying learning outcomes to cover a range of practice contexts and accrediting employer-based programmes. Meeting service needs more closely is identified as a key issue driving the new Northern Ireland Post Qualifying Framework introduced in 2007.     

Impediments to Health Care for the Foreign Student

Abstract

Today's college students occupy a “window” between older adults, whose need for hepatitis B vaccination is minimal, and younger people who receive the vaccine as part of their childhood immunization series. However, because of the high-risk activities that are often part of student behavior, college students are among the individuals who are at the highest risk for this disease; 75% of all reported hepatitis B cases occur in persons between the ages of 15 and 39 years. It is therefore imperative that college health professionals take seriously their responsibility to educate students about issues related to hepatitis B and make available programs that enable the students to receive immunizations. This article briefly describes a successful hepatitis B education and immunization program at an institution that has no mandatory prematriculation immunization requirements.     

Projecting Australia's Fertility

A method has been evolved for projecting Australia's fertility which takes into account changes in family size. Total fertility is expected to fall by about 2 per cent a year. The total number of births is likely to increase to about 285,000 in 1981 and remain at that level to the end of the century.     

On the Use of the Cause Table in Handling Common Cause Events in System Analysis

A method is presented for applying the cause table concept to the problem of common cause events. This method can be regarded as an alternative to the approach in which these events are included directly into the system fault trees. In comparison with this approach, the cause table method offers the advantage of simple fault trees, convenient visibility of the contributions of causes, and the ability to truncate the numerical calculation conveniently by aggregating small terms into an "other" category. Generally speaking, the cause table method can be said to handle common causes at the level of arithmetic (i.e., numbers) rather than at the level of algebra (determining cutsets and frequency equations).     

Implementing a quality assessment program

It is difficult to imagine a more stressed organization than today's hospital. If the scope of change is not a sufficient challenge, the rate of the change is staggering, especially in quality assessment. Now we are poised for continuous quality improvement, whereby outcomes identified by quality assessment become the focus for system and process review and modification. It is imperative that a good quality assessment program be in place before implementing and integrating a continuous quality improvement process. The purpose of this article is to show how a quality assessment system can be implemented in a community hospital, regardless of size or scope of services. Key to the process is making all staff members part of the system's development and operation.     

Inequalities in English child protection practice under austerity: A universal challenge?

The role that area deprivation, family poverty, and austerity policies play in the demand for and supply of children's services has been a contested issue in England in recent years. These relationships have begun to be explored through the concept of inequalities in child welfare, in parallel to the established fields of inequalities in education and health. This article focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and out‐of‐home care and child protection interventions. The work scales up a pilot study in the West Midlands to an all‐England sample, representative of English regions and different levels of deprivation at a local authority (LA) level. The analysis evidences a strong relationship between deprivation and intervention rates and large inequalities between ethnic categories. There is further evidence of the inverse intervention law (Bywaters et al., 2015): For any given level of neighbourhood deprivation, higher rates of child welfare interventions are found in LAs that are less deprived overall. These patterns are taking place in the context of cuts in spending on English children's services between 2010–2011 and 2014–2015 that have been greatest in more deprived LAs. Implications for policy and practice to reduce such inequalities are suggested.     

Giving birth: Expectations of first time mothers in Switzerland at the mid point of pregnancy

Problem and background

Despite a generally affluent society, the caesarean section rate in Switzerland has steadily climbed in recent years from 22.9% in 1998 to 33.7% in 2014. Speculation by the media has prompted political questions as to the reasons. However, there is no clear evidence as to why the Swiss rate should be so high especially in comparison with neighbouring countries.