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Background: Students must be proficient in surgical skills according to General Medical Council and Royal College of Surgeons of England guidelines. If these skills are not appropriately taught, there is a risk of an incoming junior workforce with inadequate surgical skills. This paper aimed to review the literature relating to undergraduate teaching of surgical skills in the UK and summarize future suggested training methods. Methods: The databases MEDLINE, Embase and SCOPUS were searched, and the existing literature relating to methodology of undergraduate teaching of surgical skills in the UK over the past 10 years was summarized. The Medical Education Research Quality Instrument was used to assess research quality. Results: A total of 19 papers were included. Cross-sectional evaluations and survey-based studies highlight a clear deficit in surgical skills teaching in the UK. Medical students are currently unable to fulfil their own learning needs and meet requirements set out by the General Medical Council. This lack of surgical teaching appears to negatively affect student desire to pursue a surgical career. The three main themes for improvement are extracurricular surgical skills days, near-peer teaching and simulation. Each method appeared to improve learning, although no studies utilized medium- to long-term follow-up to demonstrate efficacy and there lacks a clear consensus as to the 'standard' of undergraduate surgical skill education. There was also potential for selection bias and response shift bias in many of the studies assessing pre- and postintervention confidence and opinions. Conclusion: There is a concerning lack of surgical skills teaching that has resulted in medical students and junior doctors not having the necessary surgical skills as per General Medical Council guidance and students feel that their own learning needs are not met. This failure to address the learning deficit may be responsible for the fall in surgical competition ratios. While surgical skills teaching must be improved urgently, more robust evidence is required to evaluate the optimal ways of approaching this issue. Undergraduate medical students must be proficient in certain surgical skills as set out by General Medical Council and Royal College regulations. There appears a deficit in such teaching which we have discussed and attempted to address in terms of alternative methodology reported in the literature that can be used to teach these basic surgical skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) between the EU and the UK. We focus on two specific features: rules of origin and non-tariff barriers. The putative purpose of the TCA was to promote free trade between the signatories, and both of the features identified have 'level-playing-field' objectives which are designed to promote that purpose. However, both can also be used for covert protectionism against the other party to the agreement. The paper recommends that rules of origin and non-tariff barriers should be recrafted where possible, and there is a description of how this might be done. The aim of such action would be to make transparent the role of these features in preserving a level playing field. Doing this would also make clear that any residual unadulterated rules of origin and non-tariff barriers existed for purely protectionist reasons and jeopardized open borders. Hopefully, the exposure of such protectionism would encourage its dismantlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to establish the degree of presence and potential impact of ethnic minority scientists on UK science. It does this by examining their published outputs (present in SCI). Ethnic minority researchers were identified and classed within seven distinct groups based on their surname. A fractional count of their papers was used to establish which field's they research into, what types of research they conduct (from basic to applied) and what is the potential impact of their work (citations to journal). Key findings suggest that in the last 20 years the proportion of ethnic-authored papers almost doubled, Chinese were the group which contributed most papers, ethnic minorities are best represented in engineering and technology, physics and chemistry and they tend to publish in applied journals with potential impact factor lower than that of non-ethnic authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ballot order positional effects, electoral advantage gained from a candidate's surname location on the ballot paper, have been extensively studied. For ‘low-information’ elections especially candidates located at or near the top of the ballot paper are advantaged relative to their competitors. This examination of alphabetic bias uses data from local council election results in Britain. The examination of election contests featuring more than half a million candidates provides evidence of an alphabetic bias which increases as the number of vacancies increases. We calibrate the effects upon votes and vote share of alphabetical ordering of candidates. Comparing votes cast for last- and first-placed candidates in the ballot order demonstrates a clear advantage to those placed first. This increases in size as both the number of seats and competing candidates increases. Those located in the top half of the ballot paper are more likely to finish in the top half of the vote order. Subsequently, the distribution of surnames among elected councillors is clustered towards the top of the alphabet. Measures could remove the effects of alphabetic bias, such as randomising name order and introducing experiments in local council electoral practice, a cost-effective means for evaluating change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shows how the policy proposals contained in the government's Green Paper on pensions (DSS, 1998) affect the long term sustainability of Great Britain's public finances and redistribution. Description of the main proposals contained in the Green Paper; Assessment of the effect of the Green Paper on the sustainability of the public finances.

Aims The literature review aimed to identify the barriers the Punjabi and/or Sikh community have in accessing support for alcohol addiction. Method A systematic review of the literature was undertaken of four scholarly databases, Google Scholar and grey literature on UK-based research conducted after 1980 into alcohol addiction in the Punjabi and/or Sikh community. Fourteen papers met the inclusion criteria outlined in the paper and were included in the review. Results Ten main barriers to accessing support were found; stigma, religion, lack of understanding of addiction, over reliance on a medical model of treatment and disregard of therapy, cultural implications of being a member of the Punjabi and/or Sikh community and the addiction community, gender and generational differences and a lack of government commitment to alcohol support for BME communities with a lack of culturally specific services. Conclusion Despite the many barriers explored, the role of stigma remained a powerful theme throughout often underpinning other barriers. A key recommendation across many papers was the need for culturally sensitive support services. Several areas for future research were identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This volume contains a small sample of papers presented to the fiftieth UK History of Economic Thought Conference, held at Balliol College, Oxford, on 29–31 August 2018. Over forty papers were presented, and this special issue contains nine of the thirty-one submitted for possible publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present the first Frequentist framework on signal region detection in high-resolution and high-order image regression problems. Image data and scalar-on-image regression are intensively studied in recent years. However, most existing studies on such topics focussed on outcome prediction, while the research on region detection is rather limited, even though the latter is often more important. In this paper, we develop a general framework named Sparse Kronecker Product Decomposition (SKPD) to tackle this issue. The SKPD framework is general in the sense that it works for both matrices and tensors represented image data. Our framework includes one-term, multi-term, and nonlinear SKPDs. We propose nonconvex optimization problems for one-term and multi-term SKPDs and develop path-following algorithms for the nonconvex optimization. Under a Restricted Isometric Property, the computed solutions of the path-following algorithm are guaranteed to converge to the truth with a particularly chosen initialization even though the optimization is nonconvex. Moreover, the region detection consistency could also be guaranteed. The nonlinear SKPD is highly connected to shallow convolutional neural networks (CNN), particularly to CNN with one convolutional layer and one fully-connected layer. Effectiveness of SKPD is validated by real brain imaging data in the UK Biobank database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops case studies of the UK and China to analyse divergent national financial regulatory approaches to FinTech as a novel political economy of platforms. Regulating with platforms is core to the approach taken in the UK, where start-up and early-career platforms are enrolled into an innovation-friendly financial regulation regime that promotes consumption and competition balanced with stability. In China, meanwhile, measures are being instituted to enhance rules and restrictions imposed on FinTech platforms. BigTech-led FinTech expansion was encouraged to expedite financial reforms to fuel economic growth and ensure authoritarian state control, but regulation is now shown to be working against the furtherance of platform power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Older people are often explicitly or implicitly excluded from research, in particular clinical trials. This means that study findings may not be applicable to them, or that older people may not be offered treatments due to an absence of evidence. Aims The aim of this work was to develop recommendations to guide all research relevant to older people. Methods A diverse stakeholder group identified barriers and solutions to including older people in research. In parallel, a rapid literature review of published papers was undertaken to identify existing papers on the inclusion of older people in research. The findings were synthesised and mapped onto a socio-ecological model. From the synthesis we identified themes that were developed into initial recommendations that were iteratively refined with the stakeholder group. Results A range of individual, interpersonal, organisational, community and policy factors impact on the inclusion of older people in research. A total of 14 recommendations were developed such as removing upper age limits and comorbidity exclusions, involving older people, advocates and health and social care professionals with expertise in ageing in designing the research, and considering flexible or alternative approaches to data collection to maximise opportunities for participation. We also developed four questions that may guide those developing, reviewing and funding research that is inclusive of older people. Conclusion Our recommendations provide up to date, practical advice on ways to improve the inclusion of older people in health and care research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of bibliometric indicators would simplify research assessments. The 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a peer review assessment of UK universities, whose results can be taken as benchmarks for bibliometric indicators. In this study, we use the REF results to investigate whether the e p index and a top percentile of most cited papers could substitute for peer review. The probability that a random university's paper reaches a certain top percentile in the global distribution of papers is a power of the e p index, which can be calculated from the citation-based distribution of university's papers in global top percentiles. Making use of the e p index in each university and research area, we calculated the ratios between the percentage of 4-star-rated outputs in REF and the percentages of papers in global top percentiles. Then, we fixed the assessment percentile so that the mean ratio between these two indicators across universities is 1.0. This method was applied to four units of assessment in REF: Chemistry, Economics and Econometrics joined to Business and Management Studies, and Physics. Some relevant deviations from the 1.0 ratio could be explained by the evaluation procedure in REF or by the characteristics of the research field; other deviations need specific studies by experts in the research area. These results indicate that in many research areas the substitution of a top percentile indicator for peer review is possible. However, this substitution cannot be made straightforwardly; more research is needed to establish the conditions of the bibliometric assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of the recent Consultation Document, proposing a new legislative framework for a Single Equality Bill for Great Britain, provides the opportunity for consideration of the regulatory approaches that might be adopted in such legislation. The regulatory approaches adopted in previous anti-discrimination legislation are considered, followed by a discussion of a newer approach to regulation, which has been termed ‘reflexive regulation’. This newer form of regulation appears to form the preferred basis for regulation in the Consultation Paper. The potential problems with this method of regulation are examined, in particular the need to ensure that the pre-conditions for effective reflexive regulation are identified and created. It is argued that the Consultation Paper has failed to address this issue, and that several changes need to be made before the use of reflexive regulation in the area of equality is likely to be successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the co-evolution of product and industry architecture by drawing on a longitudinal study of the UK personal pensions industry between 2005 and 2020. It provides qualitative evidence for the way in which institutional structures, particularly regulation, entwine with firm strategic choices to shape the contours of an industry value chain (IVC). We draw upon modularity theory and the literature on industry architecture to consider how strategic bottlenecks emerged and how value shifted between layers of the IVC. Furthermore, we examine the interplay between the agendas of the regulator and firm strategic responses to unpack how firms (product providers) responded by pursuing integrative innovation and less specialization to mitigate the effects of value migration to strategic bottlenecks. Our findings extend recent work on product and industry architecture, highlighting how markets evolve toward less modular product configurations and less industry specialization in response to these dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit a U.K. government-sponsored product and provide evidence on shared equity mortgages. The analysis shows how the interaction of house price growth and leverage regulation promotes product adoption. Following an increase in the equity limit, households use the additional financing to buy more expensive properties rather than reduce leverage. Equity used as a complement to debt is likely less beneficial for financial stability than when used as a substitute. Equity borrowers are less likely to change lenders when refinancing their senior debt. Finally, we measure the equity provider returns, which are affected by selection and undervaluation at repayment. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix , which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on alcohol abuse by parents, one on Hungarian Roma refugees in Canada, and one on the privatization of state social work in Great Britain.

The article discusses the summaries of topic headings discusses in July 1985 issue of the "British Journal of Dermatology." In the article "The U.K. erythropoietic protoporphyria register: a progress report," a national register was set up in 1979 to establish the prevalence and natural history of erythropoietic protoporphyria (EPP). Detailed information on EPP patients has been received from dermatologists throughout the U.K. Three hundred and eighty-two patients with confirmed EPP have been identified including two patients in clinical remission and in latent cases. A further 83 biochemically unconfirmed cases have been found from family studies.

Motivation Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) predict individuals' genetic risk of developing complex diseases. They summarize the effect of many variants discovered in genome-wide association studies (GWASs). However, to date, large GWASs exist primarily for the European population and the quality of PRS prediction declines when applied to other ethnicities. Genetic profiling of individuals in the discovery set (on which the GWAS was performed) and target set (on which the PRS is applied) is typically done by SNP arrays that genotype a fraction of common SNPs. Therefore, a key step in GWAS analysis and PRS calculation is imputing untyped SNPs using a panel of fully sequenced individuals. The imputation results depend on the ethnic composition of the imputation panel. Imputing genotypes with a panel of individuals of the same ethnicity as the genotyped individuals typically improves imputation accuracy. However, there has been no systematic investigation into the influence of the ethnic composition of imputation panels on the accuracy of PRS predictions when applied to ethnic groups that differ from the population used in the GWAS. Results We estimated the effect of imputation of the target set on prediction accuracy of PRS when the discovery and the target sets come from different ethnic groups. We analyzed binary phenotypes on ethnically distinct sets from the UK Biobank and other resources. We generated ethnically homogenous panels, imputed the target sets, and generated PRSs. Then, we assessed the prediction accuracy obtained from each imputation panel. Our analysis indicates that using an imputation panel matched to the ethnicity of the target population yields only a marginal improvement and only under specific conditions. Availability and implementation The source code used for executing the analyses is this paper is available at https://github.com/Shamir-Lab/PRS-imputation-panels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid escalating apprehensions surrounding content regulation, the USA has discreetly integrated provisions reminiscent of its Communications Decency Act Section 230 (CDA 230) into trade agreements, offering broad immunity. This scholarly analysis critically assesses this manoeuvre by juxtaposing such CDA 230-like provisions against the UK's established legal framework governing online content and freedom of expression. Utilizing a comparative legal methodology, the paper underscores the pronounced differences between the USA and UK stances on intermediary liability for third-party content, moulded by their unique constitutional foundations and jurisprudential interpretations of free speech rights. The insertion of CDA 230-aligned clauses into trade agreements poses a potential threat to the UK's nuanced equilibrium between safeguarding free speech and upholding other paramount interests, such as privacy and reputation. An scrutiny of UK defamation statutes and content regulation protocols reveals inherent challenges in transplanting CDA 230 provisions into trade contexts. In summation, the paper ardently supports a diversified approach to online content governance and cautions against standardizing intermediary liability laws via trade agreements, especially between nations with divergent foundational beliefs. It fervently endorses a cross-disciplinary discourse involving both trade and legal specialists to ensure the preservation of free expression while concurrently recognizing the intricacies of crafting universally applicable standards for online platforms and content regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Alcohol increases cancer risk, but less is known about public awareness of this link. This scoping review summarizes recent findings on the public awareness of alcohol as a cancer risk factor in European Union and UK. Methods Four databases (Web of Science, MEDLINE, PsycInfo, CINAHL) were searched for papers containing data on awareness of alcohol as cancer risk factor in EU or UK published between January 2017 and December 2022, and complemented with grey literature searches. Results In total, 45 studies were included covering 18 EU countries (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden) and UK, presenting data collected between 2009 and 2022. Studies covered general population (17 studied a nationally representative sample), women, health professionals, patients and young people. Awareness of alcohol causing cancer in general was higher and studied more often than awareness of alcohol's impact on specific cancers. Among the EU general population, awareness of the link between alcohol and breast cancer ranged between 10% and 20%, head and neck cancer 15–25%, colorectal and oesophagus cancer 15–45% and liver cancer 40%. Awareness was higher among young people and specialized health professions and lower among women (the latter specifically for the breast cancer). Conclusions While awareness rates varied depending on the exact question wording, many studies showed low awareness of the alcohol-cancer link, especially for specific types such as breast and colon cancer. Public should be better informed about alcohol consumption-related cancer risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK is, like its peers in the EU, just under 80% dependent on fossil fuels. This figure has come down just over 10% since the 1970s, a period when the UK had major energy-intensive industries, most of which are now gone. The government is committed to achieving net zero for the electricity sector by 2035 on the pathway to net zero for the whole economy by 2050.. The Labour opposition has set 2030 as its electricity target. Setting out the scale of this challenge, this paper demonstrates how implausible the 2035 target is. On present policies there is little prospect that the 2035 target will be met (and virtually none for the Labour 2030 target). This paper reviews the multiple current policies and the capacity objectives and explores what would have to happen to meet the target. It sets out some of the consequences of failure to deliver, and the expectation of that failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents several abstracts related to dermatology presented during the annual meeting of British Association of Dermatologists in Great Britain. 'Facial Dermatitis: An Evaluation of the Final Diagnoses and Role of Prick Testing in 209 Patch Test Patients,' by N.M. Stone and S.M. Powell; 'Dermatitis Affecting Abdominal Stomas: How Much is Allergic?,' by C.C. Lyon, M. Bruze and M.H. Beck.

Presents several abstracts related to dermatology presented during the annual meeting of British Association of Dermatologists in Great Britain. 'A Systematic Review of Antistreptococcal Interventions for Guttate and Chronic Plaque Psoriais,' by C.M. Owen, R.J.G. Chalmers, T. O'Sullivan and C.E.M. Griffiths; 'Fixed Drug Eruptions in the U.K.—An Ever-Changing Scene,' by J.A. Savin.

Presents several abstracts related to dermatology presented during the annual meeting of British Association of Dermatologists in Great Britain. 'What is the Incidence of Lichen Sclerosus?,' by J. Powell, F. Wojnarowska, K. Hollowood and M. Vessey; 'Genital Carriage of Human Papiloma Virus (HPV) in Prepubertal Girls With and Without Vulval Disease,' by J. Powell, J. Gray and E. Ewojnarowska.

This paper documents that a large-scale government subsidy aimed at encouraging people to eat out in restaurants in the wake of the first 2020 COVID-19 wave in the United Kingdom has had a significant causal impact on new cases, accelerating the subsequent second COVID-19 wave. The scheme subsidised 50% off the cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks for an unlimited number of visits in participating restaurants on Mondays–Wednesdays from 3–31 August 2020. Areas with higher take-up saw both a notable increase in new COVID-19 infection clusters within a week of the scheme starting and a deceleration in infections within two weeks of the program ending. Similarly, areas that exhibited notable rainfall during the prime lunch and dinner hours on the days the scheme was active record lower infection incidence—a pattern that is also measurable in mobility data—and non-detectable on days during which the discount was not available or for rainfall outside the core lunch and dinner hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK left the European single market in energy on 31 December 2020, having been a leading light in its promotion. It entered into a new energy relationship with the EU-27 as outlined in the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) on 1 January 2021. This paper discusses what has happened to the UK energy sector since the Brexit referendum of June 2016. Since our previous paper on this topic in 2017, there has been a significant clarification in the impact of Brexit on the energy sector in the UK. We outline what the TCA says about energy. We then discuss the current and potential future effects of Brexit on the UK electricity and gas systems in turn. We observe that the likely economic welfare impacts on electricity are larger than the impacts on gas, but the overall microeconomic impact appears likely to be modest (but negative). We offer a number of concluding observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether pricing algorithms present novel issues that existing merger control frameworks and practices are inadequate to address, particularly in relation to pre-merger disclosure of pricing algorithms and the suitability of current tests and remedies for addressing coordinated effects. Through a comparative and critical analysis of the merger control regimes and practices of the European Union, United Kingdom, and Australia, this paper finds that whilst such regimes and practices are broadly adequate for dealing with algorithmic transactions, there are nonetheless potential areas for improvement. Disclosure of a pricing algorithm may contravene prohibitions on the sharing of competitively sensitive information. As such, merger parties may need to rethink aspects of their usual due diligence procedures. Pricing algorithms may also increase the potential for coordinated effects to arise in some markets that would ordinarily have been considered too complex, asymmetric, opaque, or insufficiently concentrated for tacit coordination to occur, or be used to retaliate more effectively against deviations from a coordinated equilibrium, or to raise the height of barriers to entry. Competition authorities may therefore need to amend their standard approach to investigating and assessing coordinated effects, as well as their traditional approach to remedies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been increasing interest in recent years in monopsony in the labour market. This paper discusses how we can measure monopsony power by combining insights from models based on both frictions and idiosyncrasies. It presents some evidence from the United Kingdom and the United States about how monopsony power varies across the wage distribution within markets, over the business cycle and over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss the role of the journal in exploring the social work profession's many dimensions. They state that a journal should reveal the ambiguities and conflict in relationships between social work, the state, politics and civil society. They inform that the British Journal of Social Work publishes papers that help in understanding how social work research can be enhanced through innovative methodologies and new theoretical ideas. An introduction to the issue is also provided.

Although health education programmes have been implemented in higher music education (HME) and their evaluations published in peer-reviewed journals, guidelines as to what ought to be included in these programmes are still missing. This study aimed to document expert discussions on the content of an ideal health education curriculum for HME students in the UK, integrating critical thinking. Four interdisciplinary workshops were conducted, where 67 experts in relevant fields took part, and were asked to discuss four lists of topics and concepts created based on literature reviews (cognitive biases, logical fallacies, critical appraisal tools and health topics). Only the list on health topics is relevant here. Notes taken by the participants and ourselves were thematically analysed. Four themes were identified, two of which are reported in this paper: (i) The health education curriculum and (ii) A settings-based approach to health. Part I of this project (published elsewhere) is focussed on the critical thinking content of health education for conservatoire students. The present paper focusses on the ideal health education curriculum and its implications for the wider context of health promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces papers published within the issue, including "The extent and correlates of the utilisation of empowerment strategies: Survey on social workers in the field of partner violence," by Li-yu Song, "Co-producing community justice: The transformative potential of personalisation for penal sanctions," by Beath Weaver, and "Introducing the Mental Capacity Advocate (IMCA) service and the reform of adult safeguarding procedures," by Marcus Redley and colleagues.

This paper explains the background to the notion of the 'geography of discontent' in the context of UK interregional inequalities and political shocks. The paper then examines how the geography of discontent has bound conflicting political and economic narratives together in ways, which makes the correcting for these regional imbalances all the more difficult, and results in ambiguity and a lack of clarity regarding the nature and form which Levelling Up processes should take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents several abstracts related to dermatology presented during the annual meeting of British Association of Dermatologists in Great Britain. 'Pulsed Tunable Dye Laser Treatment of Generalized Essential Telangiectasia,' by Y.A.I. Beshir and S.W. Lanigan; 'Efficacy of Pulsed Dye Laser (PDL) Treatment of Port Wine Stain (PWS) Malformations on the Upper Limb,' by J.C. Avenscroft, R. Mahendran and R. Sheehan-Dare.

Presents several abstracts related to dermatology presented during the annual meeting of British Association of Dermatologists in Great Britain. 'A Survey of Childhood Malignant Melanoma in the East of Scotland,' by B.D. De Silva and V.R. Doherty; 'Earliest Clinical Features of Childhood Haemangiomas,' by K. Batta, H. Goodyear, R. Waters and C. Moss.

Presents several abstracts related to dermatology presented during the annual meeting of British Association of Dermatologists in Great Britain. 'Pyoderma Gangrenosum, Bronchial Carcinoma and Tacrolimus,' by C.C. Lyon, C.E.M. Griffiths and M.M. Beck; 'Birt Hogg Dubé Syndrome and Multiple Pilar Cysts,' by S. Laube and M. Ali.

While recent debates about the professions have noted the pervasive influence of organizations, less is known about how this plays out at the macro or occupational level. In this paper, we address this concern, focusing on corporate professionalism (CP) as an emergent form which appears to be shaped by organizational interests. Drawing on relational perspectives of professions, we focus on the strategies of two associations in the UK management consultancy field over a 50-year period. Our analysis of archival and interview data reveals how, over time, both associations substantially modified their strategies in response to shifting priorities of firms employing large numbers of consultants—abandoning early commitments to occupational professionalism in favor of a corporate form. A key contribution of the paper is to develop a process model for understanding how and why CP emerges. We also highlight the need to pay more attention to the often neglected role of employing organizations in accounts of professional formation in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpellation, the production and hailing of subjectivities, is key to poststructuralist international relations (IR) theory and yet with some notable exceptions interpellation/hailing as an analytical concept remains somewhat undertheorized. This paper presents a Lacanian–Žižekian psychoanalytical theorization of interpellation in IR, while engaging with the ontology and epistemology of belonging. More specifically, this paper develops four major psychoanalytical concepts: void/lack, fantasy, jouissance, and desire, as it argues that void/lack at the subjective and objective levels renders interpellation possible and destabilises it, thus accounting for the im/possibility of belonging. This paper illustrates the psychoanalytical framework of interpellation by analyzing national-populism as manifested in the Brexit discourse in the UK as well as the interpellation in homonationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The change in scale in wood processing in the UK over the past 70 years is huge. From a position where sawmilling was on small scale satisfying local market needs with native broadleaf species, it is now a huge industry supplying about 26 per cent of our sawn softwood demand; mainly from the exotic, Sitka spruce. Development has seen the industry reach levels of technology equivalent to those in the Nordic countries and north America. Seventy years ago the only board manufacturing plants were producing plywood from imported tropical logs. Now the board industries produce chipboards, strand boards, MDF and cement bonded particleboards from the home grown resource. Overall we produce some 56 per cent of UK consumption of these products whilst in the growing MDF sector home production represents 78 per cent of demand. The wood pulp industry has developed over the past 15--20 years from a position where it had almost ceased to exist to the present situation of large volumes of newsprint, magazine papers, packaging board and fluting being produced, largely on four capital intensive sites. The sawmilling, board manufacturing and pulp and paper industries are mutually dependent upon one another for their successful operation. Residue material from sawmills for example, provides an important income source, whilst the market for small roundwood provides cash flow for forest owners prior to felling of the final sawlog crop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the secure accommodation behavior of young people, gendered relationships, and social work education in various national contexts.

There has been a renewed interest in professional and academic discourse in the reconceptualisation of social work with adults as a human rights-based approach. This is compatible with the social model of disability, which philosophically adult social workers make claims to align with. This was recently argued for when the Department of Health in England piloted a named social worker for adults with learning disabilities, whose behaviour challenged services. This paper discusses the conceptualisation of rights-based practice, its relevance and appropriateness for contemporary social work policy. Drawing on the recognition theory literature, it shall be shown that the meta-theory of rights-based practice may have relevance to contemporary social work practice with adults with learning disabilities. The paper shall also consider the renewed interest in normative reconstruction in social work practice and influencing factors such as drives towards individualism and marketisation. It will consider how these impacted on the adoption into UK policy of social work as a positive intervention to address structural inequalities, perhaps more accurately described as disablism, experienced by adults with learning disabilities, which ultimately is concluded to be a 'wicked problem'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper is motivated by longitudinal progress tests given to medical students in the United Kingdom, which are used to assess students' applied medical knowledge during their learning programme. The main analytic interest is the maximum competency each student achieves on the assessment and the point in the programme at which each student attains this competency. Direct estimates of maximum competency and the time at which students realised this competency are useful for optimising allocation of classroom and hands‐on experiences, as well as to inform curriculum development. Models have been developed for estimating the timing of a threshold or cut‐off common across people or for estimating different rates of change that occur for different phases of time. However, less attention has been paid to models interested in the timing of a value that can change across people—such as maximum competency—and where growth is flat in some phases of time. In this paper, we build a model that borrows pieces from various existing methods such as reparameterisations of polynomial models, splines for ceiling effects, time‐to‐criterion models, dynamic measurement and non‐linear mixed‐effect models to allow the motivating questions to be addressed from these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the idea of refugee 'journeys to health' (Newbold and McKeary, 2018) as a point of departure this paper examines the case of Chilean exiles in the UK. Reflecting on interviews conducted with Chilean exiles the analysis highlights how the health-related challenges that many people have experienced change over time. For some the passing of time has enabled people to make sense of what happened to them following the military coup in Chile in 1979 and this has helped them to 'move on'. For others, on-going challenges remain, for example a number of people still experienced PTSD. The paper also reflects on the difficulties encountered by refugees when dealing with formal health providers. While all of the respondents had full entitlements to NHS services the paper reflects on the informal barriers that continue to shape refugees' engagement with health care providers and limit their ability to address health concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family group conferences (FGCs) in child welfare share decision-making with family members by bringing the immediate and wider family together to make a plan to meet a child's needs. This paper reports survey findings on FGC provision in the UK in 2022 and explores whether in England the presence of an FGC service and the rate of FGC provision is associated with the rate of children in care, entering care, in kinship foster care and leaving care. Seventy-nine per cent (n  = 167) of local authorities in the UK provided FGCs to families, and 14 per cent (n  = 29) did not. Services that were more established offered a more diverse range of FGCs. The introduction of FGCs in English local authorities was associated with a higher rate of children in care, but also higher rates of kinship foster care, a key goal of FGCs where it is not possible for children to stay with their parents. Higher rates of FGCs were associated with more children leaving care, possibly due to reunification with birth families. To understand in more detail, the circumstances of children in and leaving care in local authorities with FGCs, individual data linkage studies are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a correction to a previously published article titled "The U.K. as a Technological Follower: Higher Education Expansion and the College Wage Premium." The correction addresses a coding error that affected some of the descriptive trends in the article. The error specifically impacted Figure 2 and Figure 3 in the published paper, as well as 5 additional descriptive figures in the online appendix. The correction shows that the trend of the graduate wage premium is still flat over most of the sample period, with a small decline near the end of the period, particularly in the private sector. The error did not affect any regression tables or the main findings and conclusions of the article. [Extracted from the article]

The U.K. economy experienced significant macroeconomic adjustments following the 2016 referendum on its withdrawal from the European Union. To understand these adjustments, this paper presents empirical facts using novel U.K. macroeconomic data and estimates a small open economy model with tradable and non-tradable sectors. We demonstrate that the referendum outcome can be interpreted as news about a future decline in productivity growth in the tradable sector. An immediate fall in the relative price of non-tradable goods induces a temporary "sweet spot" for tradable producers. Economic activity in the tradable sector expands in the short run, while the non-tradable sector contracts. Aggregate output, consumption, and investment growth decelerate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Left-behind places face linked economic and political problems that must be resolved jointly. This paper examines the potential contribution of basic income programs to that goal. Consisting of regular, no-strings-attached payments to citizens, basic income programs ensure resources and stability for poor and economically precarious households who comprise a significant share of left-behind places' populations. Advocacy for basic income emphasizes social and ethical commitment to individuals who have paid the price for economic decline. Thus, even though the goal of national and universal basic income remains distant in the UK, activism for basic income has succeeded in creating alternative paths for populist sentiments originating in the decline of left-behind places. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with advocates in the UK and elsewhere, I demonstrate that activism for basic income diverts potential support for ethno-nationalism and European withdrawal to alternate, place-contingent and variegated regional political paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews of official statistics for UK housing have noted that developments have not kept pace with real‐world change, particularly the rapid growth of private renting. This paper examines the potential value of big data in this context. We report on the construction of a dataset from the on‐line adverts of one national lettings agency, describing the content of the dataset and efforts to validate it against external sources. The paper specifically examines what these data might add to our understanding of changing volumes and rents in the private rented sector. Fluctuations in market share across advertising platforms make assessment of volume problematic, while rental prices appear more robust through comparison with other reference information. Focussing on one urban area, we illustrate how the dataset can shed new light on local changes. Lastly, we discuss the issues involved in making more routine use of this kind of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the main research assessment for universities in the UK. It informs university league tables and the allocation of government research funding. This paper analyses the evaluations of the REF 2014 for Economics, Business, Politics and History. First, we analyse from which journals articles have been submitted; second, to what extent journal ratings and journal impact factors predict the REF's evaluations; third, how many articles from heterodox economics journals have been submitted. We find that a small group of journals dominate the outputs submitted. Journal ratings and impact factors explain 80% of the variation in the output evaluations for Economics. These values are lower but still substantial for other disciplines. Few papers from heterodox economics journals were submitted to Economics. Overall, the REF in its present form marginalises heterodox economics, pushes it out of the discipline and endangers pluralism in economics research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The top 100 most cited papers in social work journals in 2000–09 were recently listed in a British Journal of Social Work paper by Hodge, Lacasse and Benson. The citations of these 100 papers in a two-year period (2007–09) were identified and a further manual web-based search was conducted to identify some key features of the citing sources. Descriptive statistics are presented on language of publication and national location of citing authors, as well as type of citing source. Bivariate analysis was conducted of the national location of cited journal by national location of citing first author. This analysis shows a strong tendency towards within-country citation in both the UK and USA, providing some evidence of intellectual chauvinism amongst social work academics and, more specifically, evidence of a Great Atlantic Divide. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents several abstracts related to dermatology presented during the annual meeting of British Association of Dermatologists in Great Britain. 'Occupational Contact Dermatitis Has an Appreciable Impact on Quality of Life,' by C.V. Hutchings, K.W. Shum and D.J. Gawkrodger; 'Photopatch Test Methodology— A Reassessment,' by B. Pollock and M. Wilkinson.