Government Strategy (government + strategy)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Primary exclusions: are they rising?

BRITISH JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION, Issue 4 2003
Sue Pavey
Reducing the number of pupils excluded from school has formed part of the Government's strategy for school improvement in recent years. The study reported here was conducted within an inner-city LEA. In their article, Sue Pavey, research in special education, and John Visser, senior fellow lecturer in special education, both of whom work in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, question the veracity of collected data on exclusions relating to the primary sector. Furthermore, they suggest that findings from their study indicate that exclusions are considered ineffective for the pupils concerned and are seen as a last resort by primary headteachers. More effective strategies for meeting the pupils' needs, argue Sue Pavey and John Visser, lie within enhanced, in-school support services and multi-agency approaches. The authors conclude that statistics on exclusion do not give a representative picture of real levels of exclusion in the LEA. This situation adversely affects strategic planning and the distribution of resources. In concluding their article, Sue Pavey and John Visser propose that resources should be spent on developing alternative strategies to exclusion and methods of identifying children at risk of disaffection. [source]


Monitoring poverty and social exclusion 2003

CHILD: CARE, HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2004
Richard Reading
The New Policy Institute has produced its sixth annual report of indicators of poverty and social exclusion. This year's report focuses on regional variations across England, Scotland and Wales. With 5 years of data now available to measure progress since Labour came to office in 1997, it is becoming much clearer where the Government's strategy for combating poverty and social exclusion is being successful , and where it is not. With the number of people living in low-income households now on a steady downward trend, the latest figures (for 2001/2002) passed the notable milestone of taking income poverty lower than at any time in the 1990s. The main reason why the number of people in low-income households fell in the 5 years to 2001/2002 is that there were fewer people in workless households. But, over the same period, the number of people in low-income, working households did not fall. Out-of-work benefits to both working-age families with dependent children and to pensioners have risen by around 30% in real terms since 1998, faster than earnings. This, plus the rise in tax credits, will have had a significant impact on the severity of poverty suffered by some low-income households even when it has not taken them above the low-income threshold. In education, earlier progress in increasing the numbers of those with an adequate minimum level of qualification has stalled, with no further advance since 2000, compared with rapid progress during the second half of the 1990s. Around a quarter of young people at each of the ages of 11, 16 and 19 are still failing to reach a basic level of attainment. There is no sign of any reduction since 1997 in the health inequalities which leave people with low incomes more likely to suffer serious health-related problems. Across the range of indicators, problems of poverty and social exclusion are generally more prevalent in the North-east than in other areas of the country. London has particular problems centred on low income and work and Scotland has particular problems centred on health. [source]


There's Regulatory Crime, and then there's Landlord Crime: from ,Rachmanites' to ,Partners'

THE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 6 2001
Dave Cowan
This article considers local authority strategies towards the regulation and prosecution of private landlords who commit the criminal offences of unlawful eviction and harassment. Generally, local authorities operate compliance-based strategies, rarely (if ever) resorting to prosecution. In seeking to explain this approach, the article draws upon the literature concerning regulatory crime, but also distinguishes local authority responses to landlord crime from regulatory crime as more typically conceived. Broadly, it is argued that, while there are clear parallels with other areas of regulatory activity, there is much that is different about landlord crime, particularly as a result of central government strategies towards the private rented sector, the legislative background to landlord crime, and the motivations behind local approaches to regulation. [source]


Fourteen to 17-year-olds' experience of ,risky' drinking,a cross-sectional survey undertaken in south-east England

DRUG AND ALCOHOL REVIEW, Issue 3 2004
Dr LESTER M. COLEMAN
Abstract In the UK, young people's alcohol consumption is considered an important social and health problem, and is the focus of government strategy and intervention. There is widespread concern that many young people are drinking in a ,risky' way. That is, they are often drinking large amounts of alcohol in a single session, in unsupervised locations. This small-scale, quantitative study used a shortened adaptation of the Adolescent Alcohol Expectancy Questionnaire (AEQ) to examine 14 , 17-year-olds' experience of ,risky' drinking. The results suggest that a major transition towards first ever drunkenness occurs between the ages of 14 and 15. Young people of this age are more likely to be getting very drunk in unsupervised, and potentially more harmful, locations. It is suggested that using this questionnaire could offer the potential to obtain a rapid and reliable indication of young people's propensity towards possible alcohol-related harm. [source]


Developing Clinical Terms for Health Visiting in the United Kingdom

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NURSING TERMINOLOGIES AND CLASSIFICATION, Issue 2003
June Clark
BACKGROUND The UK health visiting service provides a universalist preventive health service that focuses mainly on families with young children and the elderly or vulnerable, but anyone who wishes can access the services. The principles of health visiting have been formally defined as the search for health needs, the stimulation of awareness of health needs, influencing policies that affect health, and the facilitation of health-enhancing activities. The project is currently in its fourth phase. In phase 1, 17 health visitors recorded their encounters with families with new babies over a period of 3 months; in phase 2, 27 health visitors recorded their encounters with a wider range of clients (769 encounters with 205 families) over a period of 9 months; in phase 3, the system is being used by a variety of healthcare professionals in a specialist program that provides intensive parenting support; phase 4 is developing a prototype of an automated version for point-of-contact recording. UK nursing has no tradition of standardized language and the concept of nursing diagnosis is almost unknown. Over the past decade, however, the government has initiated the development of a standardized terminology (Read codes) to cover all disciplines and all aspects of health care, and it is likely that the emerging SNOMED-CT terminology (a merger of the Read codes with the SNOMED terminology) will be mandated for use throughout the National Health Service (NHS). MAIN CONTENT POINTS The structure and key elements of the Omaha System were retained but the terminology was modified to take account of the particular field of practice and emerging UK needs. Modifications made were carefully tracked. The Problem Classification Scheme was modified as follows: ,All terms were anglicized. ,Some areas , notably relating to antepartum/postpartum, neonatal care, child protection, and growth and development,were expanded. ,The qualifiers "actual,""potential," and "health promotion" were changed to "problem,""risk," and "no problem." ,Risk factors were included as modifiers of "risk" alongside the "signs and symptoms" that qualify problems. The Intervention Classification was modified by substituting synonymous terms for "case management" and "surveillance" and dividing "health teaching, guidance, and counseling" into two categories. The Omaha System "targets" were renamed "focus" and a new axis of "recipient" was introduced in line with SNOMED-CT. The revised terminologies were tested in use and also sent for review to 3 nursing language experts and 12 practitioners, who were asked to review them for domain completeness, appropriate granularity, parsimony, synonymy, nonambiguity, nonredundancy, context independence, and compatibility with emerging multiaxial and combinatorial nomenclatures. Review comments were generally very favourable and modifications suggested are being incorporated. CONCLUSIONS The newly published government strategy for information management and technology in the NHS in Wales requires the rapid development of an electronic patient record, for which the two prerequisites are structured documentation and the use of standardized language. The terminology developed in this project will enable nursing concepts to be incorporated into the new systems. The experiences of the project team also offer many lessons that will be useful for developing the necessary educational infrastructure. [source]


An educational process to strengthen primary care nursing practices in São Paulo, Brazil

INTERNATIONAL NURSING REVIEW, Issue 4 2007
A.M. Chiesa rn
Objective:, To describe the experience of a registered nurse (RN) training process related to the Family Health Program (FHP) developed in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Background:, The FHP is a national, government strategy to restructure primary care services. It focuses on the family in order to understand its physical and social structure in regards to the health,illness process. In the FHP, the RN is a member of a team with the same number as medical doctors , an unprecedented situation. The FHP requires a discussion of the RNs' practice, by qualifying and empowering them with tools and knowledge. Methods:, The training process was based on Freire's approach founded on critical pedagogy in order to address the fundamental problem of inequalities in health. The first phase included workshops and the second one included a course. The workshops identified the following problems related to the RN's work: lack of tools to identify the population's needs; overload of work due to the accumulation of management and assistance activities; difficulties regarding teamwork; lack of tools to evaluate the impact of nursing interventions; lack of tools to improve the participation of the community. The course was organized to tackle these problems under five thematic headings. Results:, The RN's training process allowed the group to reflect deeply on its work. This experience led to the need for the construction of tools to intervene in the reality, mainly against social exclusion, rescuing and adapting of the knowledge accumulated in the healthcare practice, identifying settings which demand institutional solutions and engaging the RN in research groups in order to develop projects according to the complexity of the primary care services. Conclusion:, The application of the concept of equity in the health sector represented a reaction against the processes of social exclusion, starting from performance at a local level to become a reality in the accomplishments achieved by the Brazilian National Health System. This training process allowed us to evaluate that partnership, which has produced many concrete results in addressing both parts of the Inequalities in Health dilemma and which is a productive way of building up a new model of health. [source]


Comparative study on the consequences of culling badgers (Meles meles) on biometrics, population dynamics and movement

JOURNAL OF ANIMAL ECOLOGY, Issue 4 2000
F. A. M. Tuyttens
1.,Capture,mark,recapture data were used to describe the process of recovery from a typical badger removal operation (BRO) at North Nibley, Gloucestershire, UK, which was carried out as part of the government's strategy to control bovine tuberculosis. Data on biometrics, demographics and movement from this low-density disturbed population were compared with those of two nearby high-density undisturbed populations (Wytham Woods and Woodchester Park, UK) in order to study fundamental principles of population dynamics and density-dependence. 2.,Badgers moved more between social groups at North Nibley than in the other study areas, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the removal operation. 3.,Recolonization of the vacated habitat occurred in the first instance by young females. 4.,Although in the first year after the BRO no cubs had been reared in any of the culled groups, and although the shortage of sexually mature boars may have limited the reproductive output of sows in the following year, the population took only 3 years to recover to its (already lowered) preremoval density. 5.,Losses from the adult (and cub) population due to mortality or emigration were smaller at North Nibley than at the other sites. 6.,There was much evidence that during 1995 and 1996 density-dependent effects constrained the reproductive output of the high-density populations, and some support for the hypothesis that badgers exhibit the non-linear ,large mammal' type of functional response to density. 7.,Badgers at North Nibley were younger, heavier and in better condition than badgers at Wytham Woods and Woodchester Park. 8.,We argue that the disease dynamics are likely to be different in disturbed compared with undisturbed badger populations, and that this could affect the effectiveness of BROs. [source]