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For a decade, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, frontline homelessness workers in England have worked within national and local policies of welfare reform and austerity, within which there was a major cut to public spending. After the COVID-19 outbreak frontline workers began working within policies relating to the pandemic and homelessness. There is little empirical research on how these policies have impacted frontline workers who support rough sleepers with a mental illness as previous research focuses on people experiencing homelessness and/or mental illness during austerity and welfare reform, rather than the experience of the frontline homelessness worker. The purpose of this empirical research was to explore the experiences of homelessness frontline workers supporting rough sleepers with a mental illness post austerity, welfare reform and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Midlands geographical area. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, ten frontline workers, who worked within a variety of statutory and third sector organisations, took part in sixteen semi-structured interviews. The study offers an explanation of how working within welfare reform, austerity and COVID-19 has affected frontline workers who support rough sleepers with a mental illness. An explanatory theory of moral distress was co-constructed with the research participants. The frontline workers worked within disconnected systems across, housing, health, social care and the department of work and pensions, with the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating this. They were frequently restricted in supporting their service users as they saw fit. This caused them to experience moral distress. The findings have significance going forward as due to the cost-of-living crisis, homelessness may increase, and planned cuts to public services will put additional pressure across housing, health, and social care services, which in turn will impact on homelessness organisations and frontline workers in the sector. If this does occur without any increase to funding to homelessness and mental health services, along with changes to policy and legislation, frontline workers will be under even higher risk of experiencing moral distress.

This project explores principles of "meaning" and "the meaningful" as active and embodied "gestures" or "lived-realities", via concepts of "sharing" and communicative relationality. These concepts were ethnographically researched in the far northern, religiously-plural Indian state of Uttarakhand. This is a state with faith-based populations variously self-identifying as Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, or Muslim. I met members of all of these faiths regularly, although my interlocutors were predominantly Christian and Hindu. Formerly a region of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand is known for its close proximity to the Himalaya, the Indian borders with Tibet and Nepal, and for its religious sanctity as an area of devout (usually Hindu) pilgrimage. All of these diverse factors have led to the consistent and complex intermingling of a number of sub-communities and regional populations. This was evident within many of the larger towns, such as Mussoorie, found in the Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, and the central-base for my fieldwork. My methodology was ethnographic and qualitative, focusing on oral-verbal communications and person-to-person interactions. These processes defined my principal concepts within this project by demonstrating the lived-realities of religious identities, religious communities, and the prevalence of inter-faith communication (or "sharing") within this region. Most significantly, my research highlighted the ongoing importance of meanings - as well as the notable variance in what "the meaningful" was actually considered to be across and between faiths. Such diversity in understanding was made even more complex by different meanings being expressed in the same language, forms, narratives, or verbal images. Within these communications, metaphor was a creative, commonly used, and actively-engaged principle, evidenced within the practice of (different) faiths. This demonstrated a form of "relationality" or "inter-relationality" that seemed to reinforce contemporary, anthropological concepts of embodied lived-realities being a fundamental aspect of the relational, but not the same as "definitionality" or as "meaning". Yet, when in use in Uttarakhand, principles, concepts (and uses) of expressive form, representation, communication, "sharing", and "meaning", were frequently entangled . Many apparent "oral metaphors" and "descriptions" - including images of "sacrifice", "heart-speech", God, Gods, or the cosmological/transcendent - had extended-meanings and purposes in their Garhwali context. Such meanings and actions were in contrast to what I had previously understood metaphor "to be". These were not solely representational-metaphors, they were, instead, acts of agency (via expression). These observations led to my own evolution of the term "ontological-metaphor". The metaphorical was persistently utilised not only as a "symbolic- tool", but as an overlapping, entwined lived-form that was capable of encapsulating the relational and definitional-meaningful. This was not merely in a simultaneous representation, but as a co-creational state-of-being or "ontology".

Tone Relieving Ankle Foot Orthoses (TRAFOs) have been used in the management of neurophysically impaired patients for some years within the United States and during the last few years they have been introduced in the UK. The main difference between a TRAFO and a standard polypropylene ankle foot orthosis (AFO) is that the TRAFO does not have a flat base beneath the foot, but one with various raised and hollowed areas. This unique base is designed to hold the foot in a neutral position and provide support and stability under the dynamic arches of the foot. The investigation aimed to determine any benefits of using TRAFOs in the management of children with cerebral palsy in comparison with those obtained using standard anide foot orthoses. Fifteen children were recruited into the investigation and assigned to one of two groups. Group 1 were monitored in standard AFOs for six months and group 2 were monitored in AFOs for three months and then in TRAFOs for a second three month period. The subjects were assessed at regular intervals during the six month period using EMG analysis to establish changes in the pattern of muscular activity during gait. Video analysis and force platform data was also used to determine general gait parameters and record ground reaction vectors. Results for EMG and the temporal and spatial parameters were unable to highlight any areas in which tone-relieving ankle-foot orthoses produced more favourable results than standard polypropylene ankle-foot orthoses. The results suggest that TRAFOs may not work in the neurological manner previously indicated and may have no greater benefit to a patient than a standard polypropylene AFO.