Involving carers in mental health service development.

Objective: A project designed to enhance carer participation in a mental health service is described.

Method: Carers of people with a mental illness were involved in reviewing and developing policies, and developing a carer rights and responsibilities booklet.

Results: Policies relevant to carers of people with a mental illness were reviewed and updated, and new policies developed to cover existing gaps.

An integrated approach to general practice mental health training: the importance of context.

Objective: The high prevalence of mental disorders and the barriers to detection and treatment of these in general practice are well recognized. As such, the government has placed great emphasis on training general practitioners (GPs) in primary care mental health and on the provision of support for GPs in the delivery of such services. The current paper aims to evaluate a local, rural training program in mental health for GPs.

First year of practice visits for the Rural Depression Anxiety Research and Treatment General Practice program.

Objective: To describe the first 12 months activities of a key component of a General Practice Psychiatry program - the GP practice visit.

Design: Questionnaire to evaluate effects on participating general practitioners practice.

Setting: Rural group general practices.

Impaired bone marrow homing of cytokine-activated CD34+ cells in the NOD/SCID model.

The reduced engraftment potential of hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs) after exposure to cytokines may be related to the impaired homing ability of actively cycling cells. We tested this hypothesis by quantifying the short-term homing of human adult CD34+ cells in nonobese diabetic/severe combined immunodeficient (NOD/SCID) animals. We show that the loss of engraftment ability of cytokine-activated CD34+ cells is associated with a reduction in homing of colony-forming cells (CFCs) to bone marrow (BM) at 24 hours after transplantation (from median 2.

Influence of cell cycling and cell division on transendothelial migration of CD34+ cells.

The migration of haemopoietic stem and progenitor cells across endothelium lining bone marrow sinuses is a critical first step in the homing and successful engraftment of these cells. We have previously shown that freshly isolated mobilized peripheral blood CD34+ cells adhere to the endothelial surface but do not transmigrate unless activated by growth factors. The aim of this work was to examine the relationship between cell cycle progression, cell division and migration across endothelium.

Fetal haemopoietic cells display enhanced migration across endothelium.

Fetal haemopoietic cells continually circulate and migrate into tissues, and thus may have specialized homing capabilities. In this study we investigated the in vitro features of haemopoietic cells in fetal blood and liver which are relevant to homing and engraftment. Fetal cells were examined for long-term culture-initiating cell (LTC-IC) and progenitor content, adhesion molecule expression, cell cycle behaviour and transendothelial migratory activity.