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Background: In 2009, Portugal ratified the UN CRPD and a turn to a rights-based approach in disability law and policy has intensified since. It thus becomes important to understand whether these legal changes are furthering the social inclusion of adults with intellectual and complex disabilities. Method: Questionnaires were applied to a stratified sample of 127 adults with intellectual and complex disabilities attending social care and vocational training programmes across the country. Results: Participants reported low rates of social participation, and many (49%) were found to live below the poverty line. High rates of discrimination and violence and feelings of loneliness and sadness were also reported, which can be strong indicators of the oppression that many of them daily endure. Conclusion: Adults with intellectual and complex disabilities in Portugal face exclusion, discrimination, and violence. The poverty and isolation in which many of them live compounds their (de)citizenship status in Portuguese society. more...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an example of best practice towards enhancing employability in the cross-sectoral labour market for doctorate-holders. This was achieved through an Erasmus+ KA2 (Strategic Partnership) skills development project which created a training programme (TRANSPEER) involving a multi-disciplinary cohort of researchers at a range of career stages, drawn from universities in Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the UK. Design/methodology/approach: Research support staff designed and delivered four transnational training events for the cohort, with the overarching theme of enhancing researcher employability. An initial skills awareness survey of the researcher cohort was undertaken prior to the start of the programme; this survey was repeated after each event. An additional aim of the project was the development of the consortium's research support staff through exposure to the facilitation techniques and methodologies of their international colleagues. Findings: The findings indicate that transnational collaboration in researcher development enhances the learning environment for participating researchers and provides significant professional development opportunities for both researchers and researcher developers. The findings further suggest the benefits of mixing cohorts across career stages and engaging researchers with novel and interactive approaches on themes not typically addressed in academic competence development offerings. Originality/value: Transversal skills development cooperation between universities--especially transnational cooperation--is rare. Even more so is the professional development of research support staff in a transnational context. This paper outlines the benefits of such collaborative activities. more...

The development of an inclusive education system is regarded as a fundamental pillar for the full participation of persons with disabilities in society. To date, research on inclusive education has been mainly focused on students with disabilities, special education teachers and the role of legislation with less attention being paid to another important player in the implementation of a truly inclusive education system: teachers with disabilities. To address this knowledge gap, in this article we present a literature review, analysing the main findings and contributions from research that examines issues pertaining to teachers with disabilities. Drawing from 53 articles published in English in peer-review journals, the paper identifies four main research topics: (1) Teachers' life trajectories, educational practices, and challenges; (2) Teacher's training; (3) Perspectives about teachers with disabilities (among students and school principals), and (4) the under-representation of teachers with disabilities in the literature. We conclude arguing that the research agenda on inclusive education would benefit from including the perspective of teachers with disabilities. more...

Author(s): Joana Nogueira [sup.1] [sup.2] , Bianca Gerardo [sup.1] [sup.2] , Ana Rita Silva [sup.1] [sup.2] , Paula Pinto [sup.2] , Rosa Barbosa [sup.1] , Sílvia Soares [sup.2] , Beatriz [...], The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted all countries to adopt restraining measures to mitigate the spread of the disease. Usually, large-scale disasters tend to be accompanied by significant increases of psychological distress, depression and anxiety. Confinement measures imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to have similar consequences. In the present study we aim to evaluate how COVID-19 affected the overall psychological functioning of Portuguese individuals by providing a comparison of current data with status prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study sample was composed of 150 cognitively healthy participants. Results show an overall maintenance of cognitive capacities, although subjective cognitive decline complaints significantly increased during the pandemic. Regarding mental health, restraining measures culminated in an aggravation of depressive and decrease of the perceived quality of life, associated with feelings of loneliness and perceived social isolation. Finally, higher levels of pre-COVID-19 quality of life seem to play a protective role against depression and anxiety and predict less difficulties in emotion regulation, feelings of solitude and cognitive complaints. In sum, confinement due to COVID-19 implied an aggravation of the mental health of the Portuguese population, which appears to have been attenuated in those with higher pre-pandemic levels of perceived quality of life. more...

Background: COPD is highly underdiagnosed, thus applying clinical prediction scales such as the COPD Diagnostic Questionnaire (CDQ) helps to address this problem. Objective: To evaluate the criterion validity and in-tra-rater reproducibility of the questionnaire CDQ in a Colombian population. Materials and methods: A prospective cohort study. The reproducibility was assessed with the Kappa sta-tistic and the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Validity was established with the score obtained from the CDQ questionnaire and the spirometry values (FEV1/ FVC 16.5 and < 19.5, and high probability of CDQ COPD ≥ 19.6. The ACOR was 0.68 (95%CI: 0.647-0.712), a sensitivity of 79% and a specificity of 44% were obtained for a score ≥16.5, with a PPV of 26% and a NPV of 86%. Conclusions: The CDQ questionnaire has a regu-lar performance for the diagnosis of COPD with an ACOR similar to other questionnaires, it can be useful in underdiagnosed patients. The optimal cut-off point for this population was 16.5. more...

Intrapartum asphyxia is responsible for approximately 900 000 deaths per year worldwide. These numbers show the urgency of investing in the quality of fetal health care. The heart rate signal is a complex signal and sometimes behaves unpredictably. Thus, it becomes relevant to study approaches that take into account their complexity, namely non-linear compression-based methods. In this work, feature extraction was based on two approaches: univariate and bivariate. The univariate approach is concerned with the extraction of fetal, maternal and maternal-fetal compression ratios and the bivariate approach aims to extract compression indices from maternal-fetal heart rate simultaneous signals and of each of the signals individually over time. To understand how the features calculated in this work can be useful in distinguishing acidemic and non-acidemic cases, a classifier was applied. Three different classifiers were tested, and the one that proved to be more effective was the Support-Vector Machine. Furthermore, it was also possible to conclude that the input set of variables that provides a better performance (f1-score = 0.793) of the classifier is composed of the variables of maternal-fetal compression ratio, maternal-fetal normalized relative compression and maternal-fetal normalized compression distance, obtained through trend and residual signal, which indicates that slow and fast fluctuations on the heart rate time series are important in acidemia assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

This article assesses evidence of and challenges to the development of inclusive education in Portugal, which is built on three pillars: access to, participation in, and achievement in education for all children and young people. It presents an overview of the present policy framework, followed by an analysis of available statistical data on Portuguese students with disabilities in mainstream schools. The article also discusses significant achievements at the policy and practice levels, namely the attempt to align curriculum and pedagogy and the presence of almost 100% of students with disabilities in mainstream schools. It also considers challenges, such as the issue of monitoring achievement (both at the student and system level) and investments in the system and in teacher education. more...