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Background and Aims If socio-economic disadvantage is associated with more adolescent smoking, but less participation in tertiary education, and smoking and tertiary education are both associated with heavier drinking, these may represent opposing pathways to heavy drinking. This paper examines contextual variation in the magnitude and direction of these associations. Design Comparing cohort studies. Setting United Kingdom. Participants Participants were from the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS58; n = 15 672), the British birth cohort study (BCS70; n = 12 735) and the West of Scotland Twenty-07 1970s cohort (T07; n = 1515). Measurements Participants self-reported daily smoking and weekly drinking in adolescence (age 16 years) and heavy drinking (> 14/21 units in past week) in early adulthood (ages 22-26 years). Parental occupational class (manual versus non-manual) indicated socio-economic background. Education beyond age 18 was coded as tertiary. Models were adjusted for parental smoking and drinking, family structure and adolescent psychiatric distress. Findings Respondents from a manual class were more likely to smoke and less likely to enter tertiary education (e.g. in NCDS58, probit coefficients were 0.201 and -0.765, respectively; P < 0.001 for both) than respondents from a non-manual class. Adolescent smokers were more likely to drink weekly in adolescence (0.346; P < 0.001) and more likely to drink heavily in early adulthood (0.178; P < 0.001) than adolescent non-smokers. Respondents who participated in tertiary education were more likely to drink heavily in early adulthood (0.110 for males, 0.182 for females; P < 0.001 for both) than respondents with no tertiary education. With some variation in magnitude, these associations were consistent across all three cohorts. Conclusions In Britain, young adults are more likely to drink heavily both if they smoke and participate in tertiary education (college and university) despite socio-economic background being associated in opposite directions with these risk factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The integration of patient safety into nursing curricula has been under the spotlight during recent years. Effective patient safety pedagogies and students’ sensitivity to their own role in healthcare have important roles in ensuring safe clinical performances. The patient safety content of pre-registration nursing education has previously been studied, but there is sparse evidence about how nursing students assess their own patient safety competence. Objective: To examine and compare the self-assessment of patient safety competence between British and Finnish nursing students. Methods: The Patient Safety in Nursing Education Questionnaire (PaSNEQ), in the 4-point Likert scale format, was used. We distributed 502 surveys to the final year nursing students, prior to registration in two universities of applied sciences in Finland (n = 299) and two universities in the UK (n = 203) during 2012. Of which, a total of 353 (70%) nursing students in Finland (n=195) and the UK (n=158) responded to the survey. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression. Results: Majority of both British and Finnish participants reported that their curriculum did not include a separate module for patient safety. The overall patient safety competence of British and Finnish nursing students was high. However, the British nursing students evaluated their overall patient safety competence significantly higher than Finnish nursing students. Both groups of students ranked their competence to prevent patient safety incidents (attitude) the highest and their competence to act after errors (skill) relatively low. The predictors for having a high level of patient safety competence for nursing students were being British and detecting separate patient safety module in the curriculum. Conclusions: Nurse educators should provide students with more effective practice environment that will prepare them with the patient safety skills needed to respond to errors at work safely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]