Background: There are currently 2.5 million people economically inactive in the UK due to sickness. The government is considering a range of new initiatives to bring them back into the workforce; however, a lack of occupational health (OH) professionals, who play an important part in the recovery of physical and mental conditions that would otherwise inhibit employees from working, is hindering these efforts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSharing personal stories with others is essential to human interaction and language development. To communicate, individuals use a variety of semiotic resources, including images, symbols, and written and spoken language. These modes are deployed in the co-construction of a daily face-to-face conversation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Ancillary staff - cleaning, catering, housekeeping and laundry workers - play a crucial role in care homes, by promoting infection control, food preparation and hygiene, and contributing to the care home environment. This study sought to understand the experiences of ancillary staff working in English care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results will inform policy makers, employers, care home managers and others, both in England and overseas, as how to best support the ancillary workforce.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: In England, Personal Assistants (PAs) are part of an international trend towards state funded but client-hired or directly employed care workers. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted and exacerbated pre-existing risks and advantages of this arrangement for both PAs and people with care and support needs.
Objectives: We aim to report PAs' reflections on their experiences of working since the pandemic started in 2020 and highlight the longer-term implications for health and care services.
The emergence of high resolution population genetic techniques, such as genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS), in combination with recent advances in particle modelling of larval dispersal in marine organisms, can deliver powerful new insights to support fisheries conservation and management. In this study, we used this combination to investigate the population connectivity of a commercial deep sea lobster species, the New Zealand scampi, Metanephrops challengeri, which ranges across a vast area of seafloor around New Zealand. This species has limited dispersal capabilities, including larvae with weak swimming abilities and short pelagic duration, while the reptant juvenile/adult stages of the lifecycle are obligate burrow dwellers with limited home ranges.
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