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The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of mental capacity legislation when applied to parents with learning difficulties who lack capacity within childcare and family law proceedings in England and Wales.

The paper relies on a range of material including reports published by independent mental health foundations, official inquiries and other public bodies. It also refers to academic and practitioner material in journals and government guidance.

The paper critically reviews the application of the guidance when assessing mental capacity legislation as applied in England and Wales and offers by way of illustration several case examples where psychological assessments, and the enhancement of capacity, have assisted parents who were involved in childcare and family law proceedings.

There has been little published research or governmental reports on the number of cases when parents involved in childcare and family law proceedings have been found to lack capacity. No published prevalence data are available on the times when enhancing capacity has resulted in a change of outcome in childcare and family law proceedings.

The duty is on the mental health practitioners assessing mental capacity that they do so in a structured and supportive role adhering to good practice guidance and follow the guiding principles of mental capacity legislation assuming that the individual has capacity unless it is established that they lack capacity. Guidance and training is needed to ensure that the interpretation of the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) and its application is applied consistently.

For those who are considered to lack mental capacity to make specific decisions, particularly within childcare and family law proceedings, safeguards are in place to better support such individuals and enhance their capacity in order that they can participate more fully in proceedings.

While the MCA legislation has now been enacted for over ten years, there is very little analysis of the implications of capacity assessments on parents involved in childcare and family law proceedings. This paper presents an overview and, in places, a critical analysis of the new safeguarding duties of mental health practitioners when assessing for, and enhancing capacity in parents.

This paper aims to describe the use of an innovative resilience-building training programme delivered to NHS Safeguarding Leads and other participating professionals over a five-month period concluding in March 2019. The developers used knowledge and expertise in both the fields of psychology and drama-based learning to promote comprehension, retention and a capacity for using and conveying these strategies to other health-care workers.

Attendees were given pre- and post-questionnaires to examine the effectiveness of the training in terms of understanding the stages of burnout, developing an awareness of personal risk factors that may be associated with potential burnout and their perceptions of the confidence they have in both evaluating their personal resilience and using acquired skills and coping techniques that they may apply to their personal and professional lives. A Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test was administered, to assess the significance of the difference between pre- and post-training scores.

Following the training, participants reported statistically significant improvements relating to their understanding of terms, including “burnout”. They also reported an increased awareness of their personal risk factors associated with burnout and felt more resilient having completed the training. Statistically significant changes were reported in all of these areas, with the drama element of the training being commended on about one third of all feedback forms where, with the post-test results, a narrative (unscored) opportunity for feedback was sought.

The authors note that a long-term follow-up of retention and use of this training was not undertaken, though they consider that, post-pandemic, this necessary training can be reinitiated and that, as with other professional initiatives, video-engagement technology may be, through innovative efforts, merged with these effective training techniques as an option for future training applications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this training programme was the first of its kind to use a psychologically underpinned drama-based didactic approach to build resilience and protect against burnout. The results of this paper show that this training used an effective and efficient medium for successfully meeting these primary objectives.

It is considered that using a similar training approach would be effective in building resilience and preventing burnout in health-care professionals.

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an innovative resilience-building training programme drawing upon the field of psychology and drama-based learning to support safeguarding professionals within the NHS.

Worker classification continues to be a highly litigated area of taxation. That is, the status of a worker as an employee or independent contractor remains a topic closely scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service. This study examines factors that the judiciary deems relevant in ruling whether a worker is an employee or independent contractor. A backward stepwise logistic regression model is implemented to categorize the factors that best predict the court’s decision on whether a worker is either an employee or independent contractor pursuant to the factors in Revenue Ruling 87-41 (1987-1 CB 296), judge gender, and political affiliation. The results indicate three factors (supervision/instructions, continuing relationship, and the right to discharge) are capable of accurately predicting 93 percent of the decisions made by the US Tax Court. Other findings support notable statistical differences between male and female judges rendering decisions and reaching conclusions. Also, there is a statistically significant difference based on the type of industry. Political affiliation appears to have no significant impact on judicial rulings.

Although employee race has been an actively investigated area of scientific inquiry for decades, a thorough and informed understanding of the role of race in the organizational sciences has eluded us for a number of reasons. The relationship of race and stress in organizations is a prime example of this neglect and deficiency in our knowledge base, as little work has been done in this area. We attempt to address this limitation in the literature by proposing an inductively derived, review-centric framework that attempts to articulate the multiple intermediate linkages that explain the process dynamics taking place in the relationship between employee race and health and well-being in organizations. We argue that socialization processes, social networks, information and resource access, and mentoring contribute to distance and differences between racial minorities and nonminorities concerning control, reputation, performance, and political understanding and skill, which in turn, creates barriers to success, and increased stress and strain for racial minorities. The implications of this framework along with directions for future theory and research are discussed in this chapter.

This chapter examines the impact of banking competition, bank regulation, and the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008–2009 on banks’ productivity changes. For the empirical analysis, I apply a semi-parametric two-step approach of Malmquist index estimates and bootstrap regression to a cross-country panel data of 8,451 commercial banks from 82 countries over the period 2004–2012. Empirical results show that (1) banking competition and capital regulation significantly enhance bank productivity, (2) a tighter bank supervision have a positive impact on bank productivity, and (3) bank productivity decreases during the GFC, but starts to increase as the GFC recovers. I also present consistent evidence that commercial banks in countries with better national governance have higher productivity growth before, during and after the GFC.

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of choices, particularly those that involve risk. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward those choices might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective risk perceptions might not accord with expert assessments of probabilities. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the need to jettison naive notions of revealed preferences, according to which every choice by a subject expresses her objective function, as behavioral evidence forces us to confront pervasive inconsistencies and noise in a typical individual’s choice data. A principled account of errant choice must be built into models used for identification and estimation. These challenges demand close attention to the methodological claims often used to justify policy interventions. They also require, we argue, closer attention by economists to relevant contributions from cognitive science. We propose that a quantitative application of the “intentional stance” of Dennett provides a coherent, attractive and general approach to behavioral welfare economics.

Many investors have been disappointed with the practical results of portfolio insurance programs, which attempt to achieve option‐like results through dynamic hedging. This article takes the simplest form of dynamic hedging, constant proportion portfolio insurance (CPPI), as a model for developing a more optimal approach. The author uses Monte Carlo simulation to model the multi‐period median growth in discretionary wealth. In addition, he constructs leverage policies that mitigate the practical drawbacks to dynamic hedging. The article also shows that self‐imposed ex ante borrowing constraints (not the ex post constraint imposed by a margin call) can, under certain conditions, improve the performance of dynamic hedging with respect to median terminal wealth.

At the beginning of any conceptual work concerning communication management, there is a demand for a deeper understanding of the problem that needs to be addressed and for the context in which it occurs. Communication management practice mostly relies on instruments like briefings, structured interviews or classic controlling data, when it comes to an analysis of organisational structures. This chapter shows that the potentials of a more constructivist perspective and a qualitative methodology can be useful to find out what is really at stake. It presents creative visualisation of organisational contexts and visual grounded theory methodology by the example of internal communication management.

Advances in artificial intelligence have ushered in new opportunities for marketers in the domain of content generation. We discuss approaches that have emerged to generate text and image content. Drawing on the customer equity framework, we then discuss the potential applications of automated content generation for customer acquisition, relationship development, and customer retention. We conclude by discussing important considerations that businesses must make prior to adopting automated content generation.