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The US prison population has recently reached an all-time high, with women representing the fastest growing subpopulation. Correctional health-care system in the USA remains fragmented and nonuniform in practice, particularly in women’s health care, with poor transitions between incarceration and release. This study aims to examine the qualitative health-care experiences of women while incarcerated and their transition into the community health-care setting. Additionally, this study also examined the experiences of a subset of women who were pregnant while incarcerated.

After obtaining institutional review board approval, adult, English-speaking women with a history of incarceration within the past 10 years were interviewed using a semi-structured interview tool. Interview transcripts were analyzed using inductive content analysis.

The authors completed 21 full interviews and identified six themes that were both the most significant and most novel: “feeling stigmatized and insignificant,” “care as punishment,” “delay in care,” “exceptions to the rule,” “fragmentation of care” and “obstetric trauma and resilience.”

Women face numerous barriers and hardships when accessing basic and reproductive health-care services while incarcerated. This hardship is particularly challenging for women with substance use disorders. The authors were able to describe for the first time, partially through their own words, novel challenges described by women interacting with incarceration health care. Community providers should understand these barriers and challenges so as to effectively reengage women in care upon release and improve the health-care status of this historically marginalized group.

Recovery Colleges were developed to support the recovery of people with mental health difficulties through courses co-produced by professionals and people with lived experience. This study aims to examine the use of Recovery Colleges to support people with dementia.

A survey was circulated to UK Recovery College and memory service staff, exploring provision, delivery and attendance of dementia courses. Open responses provided insight into participant views about recovery in post-diagnostic support and the practicalities of running dementia courses.

A total of 51 Recovery College staff and 210 memory service staff completed the survey. Twelve Recovery College dementia courses were identified across the UK. Three categories emerged from the qualitative data: post-diagnostic support, recovery in the context of dementia, challenges and areas of innovation.

This study highlights the benefits and practicalities of running Recovery College courses with people with dementia. Peer-to-peer learning was seen as valuable in post-diagnostic support but opinions were divided about the term recovery in dementia.

Prior research suggests that collaboration is key to sustainable community development and environmental management, and peer-to-peer learning (P2PL) may facilitate community building and collaborative learning skills. This study aims to examine the effect of P2PL on the enhancement of environmental management and sustainable development skills, community building and social capital (i.e. connectedness) and understanding of course learning objectives.

Quantitative and qualitative longitudinal survey data was collected in a sustainable development focused course offered at a large American public university that uses P2PL to explicitly facilitate community building and collaborative skills. Safety precautions and changing locational course offerings due to the COVID-19 pandemic in years 2020, 2021 and 2022 provided an opportunity to evaluate the impact of P2PL on these skills during both virtual and in-person formats. Additionally, this study compared in-course student evaluations with students taking other sustainable development-related courses with collaborative learning aspects to understand the wider effectiveness of this course structure.

This study finds that course format (virtual vs in-person) overall made no difference in either connectedness or conceptual understandings, and that students in both formats felt more connected to others than students taking other courses with P2PL. Scaffolding P2PL and supplemental peer support can yield improved connectedness and learning among students taking environmental coursework.

Sustainable development requires group collaboration and partnership building skills. Issues are consistently raised about the challenges to teaching these skills in higher education. The students and instructors in this research study identify P2PL strategies to address these challenges for in-person and virtual classroom settings.