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This article outlines the housing situation facing families with disabled children, and particularly draws attention to the additional disadvantage experienced by families with disabled children from black and minority ethnic groups. It is a summary of a workshop presented by the author to the Race Equality Foundation conference in November 2007 on the theme of extending choice and participation for black and minority ethnic communities.

Frequent attendance at emergency departments (ED) has been identified in adult protection reviews as a potential warning sign of the escalation of someone’s vulnerability. Concern has been expressed about the engagement of the National Health Service (NHS) in adult protection and the small number of NHS adult protection referrals. More specifically ED departments have been identified as an area of high patient through put where there has been little evidence around how well adult support and protection (ASP) was being delivered. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A series of audits were undertaken in three different hospitals across a large Scottish Health Board accessing ED at different times of day on different days of the week to test out whether NHS staff working in EDs are identifying adults who meet the criteria of “an adult at risk”.

The audits identified a total of 11 patients from a total sample of 552 records examined who may have met the criteria to be considered an adult at risk, although further information would have been required to make a fully informed decision.

The main study limitation is that the hospitals are all within a single Health Board. The EDs have a large number of admissions and it is possible that a less pressurised area, might have a lower threshold of “risk” than the practitioners involved in the audits. The decision as to whether an adult was considered to meet the three-point test by the three people undertaking the audit was dependent on the quality of information recorded on the patients’ electronic hospital record.

It is essential that NHS Boards proactively support practice in ED settings so staff are able to identify adults at risk of harm under the ASP legislation so that ED staff are responsive to ASP needs.

The research evidence around adult protection in the UK is still emerging. The development of good practice based on the Scottish Government’s ASP legislation is still being shaped. In England and Wales, the principles of identification and multi-agency working underpinning the safeguarding of vulnerable individuals are broadly similar to Scotland. These audits add to the literature by challenging the assumption that patients who would benefit from local authority investigation and possible support are not being identified within EDs.

Housing policy debates currently focus on the need to remove physical barriers that exclude disabled people from undertaking normal, everyday activities in the home and neighbourhood environment. They have not yet considered the impact that living in poverty has on the social exclusion of disabled people. This article outlines some key findings from a recent study which found that the everyday experience of living in a deprived area, rather than physical barriers, was a key cause of social exclusion among visual impaired children. However, most housing providers were wedded to the narrow ‘physical barriers’ view of the causes of disability, and were therefore unresponsive to parents' requests for a transfer to a better area for their children.

The purpose of this paper is to create a parallel timeline between the Zimbabwe Librarian, the national trade journal for librarianship during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, government statistics, non‐governmental information, media reports, and other secondary sources to determine the effects of Zimbabwe's political and economic fortunes on libraries.

The primary methodology is a review of secondary sources in the form of trade journals, economic data and media reports. The approach of the paper is to compare the state of libraries in Zimbabwe during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2005, showing the change in librarianship and library services as economic prosperity changed dramatically.

The policies of three successive governments have promised support for libraries but have ultimately been unable to implement a national library system. Libraries in 2008 have fewer resources available than they had in the 1960s.

This paper is based on media sources as well as statistical data. The Zimbabwe Librarian ceased as a quarterly journal in approximately 1997. Since 2000, it has been issued as a semi‐annual journal. The author had access to a limited span of the Zimbabwe Librarian; therefore, this article focuses on the period from 1969‐1995. Media sources available in Zimbabwe after 2001 are frequently propaganda organizations.

This article provides an overview of historical and current events in the Zimbabwe library community in the light of political and economic events.