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The purpose of this paper is to identify organisational, technical and individual factors leading to maternal deaths in non-citizen women in Botswana.

A sub-analysis was conducted comparing non-citizen women to citizens in a case record review of maternal deaths in 2010. Feedback on the results to health professionals was provided and their comments were noted.

In total, 19.6 per cent of 56 case notes reviewed to establish contributory factors to maternal deaths were in non-citizens. This is lower than health professionals perceptions that most maternal deaths are in non-citizens. Non-citizens were significantly less likely to have been tested for HIV and less likely to have received antenatal care, so did not receive interventions to prevent transmission of HIV to their infants or anti-retroviral therapy. They were more likely than citizens to have miscarried or delivered before 28 weeks gestational age at death. Delays in seeking health care were a major contributory factor to death.

Incomplete record keeping and missing details, with 30 per cent of the notes of maternal deaths missing, a common problem with retrospective case-note studies.

Botswana is unlikely to meet Millennium Development Goal five target to reduce the maternal mortality ratio by 75 per cent. To make progress non-citizens must be given the same rights to access maternal health services as citizens. Rationing healthcare for non-citizens is a false economy since treatment of subsequent obstetric emergencies in this group is expensive.

Discrimination against non-citizen women in Botswana, by denying them free access to maternal health services, extends into loss of life because of delays in seeking healthcare especially for obstetric emergencies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a situational overview of the facility-based maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality audits (MPMMAs) in SSA, their current efficacy at reducing mortality and morbidity rates related to childbirth.

This is a scoping literature review based on the synthesis of secondary literature.

Not all countries in SSA conduct MPMMAs. Countries where MPMMAs are conducted have not instituted standard practice, MPMMAs are not done on a national scale, and there is no clear best practice for MPMMAs. In addition, auditing process of pediatrics and maternal deaths is flawed by human and organizational barriers. Thus, the aggregated data collected from MPMMAs are not adequate enough to identify and correct systemic flaws in SSA childbirth-related health care.

There are a few published literature on the topic in sub-Saharan Africa.

This review exposes serious gaps in literature and practice. It provides a platform upon which practitioners and policy makers must begin to discuss ways of embedding mortality audits in SSA in their health systems as well as health strategies.

The findings of this paper can inform policy in sub-Saharan Africa that could lead toward better outcomes in health and well-being.

The paper is original.

This paper aims to outline the process of undertaking the Confidential Inquiry (CI) into the deaths of people with learning disabilities and discusses three particular issues: engaging with professionals; maintaining confidentiality; and the tension between wanting to base the findings on a sufficiently large number of cases so that the findings are robust and reliable, but also wanting to make immediate changes to any potentially modifiable factors found to contribute to the deaths of people with learning disabilities.

The CI into the deaths of people with learning disabilities reviews the deaths of all people with learning disabilities living in the (former) Avon and Gloucestershire areas. It has been commissioned by the Department of Health to run until March 2013. One of the key drivers for a CI has been the work of Mencap in exposing the unequal health care that some people with learning disabilities received in the NHS.

The principal goal of the CI is to improve the standard and quality of care for people with learning disabilities and ultimately their health outcomes. The CI team aims to detect potentially modifiable contributory factors in the care of a person with learning disabilities who has subsequently died, share any examples of good practice in their care and provide information to guide the commissioning of services.

It is anticipated that the findings of the CI will provide a considerable amount of evidence on which to improve the standard and quality of care for people with learning disabilities and ultimately their health outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of the Confidential Inquiry into premature deaths of people with intellectual disabilities (CIPOLD) in relation to the Mental Capacity Act (England and Wales) (MCA) 2005.

CIPOLD reviewed the deaths of all known people with intellectual disabilities (ID) aged four years and over who had lived in the study area and died between 2010 and 2012.

The deaths of 234 people with ID aged 16 years and over were reviewed. There were two key issues regarding how the MCA was related to premature deaths of people with ID. The first was of the lack of adherence to aspects of the Act, particularly regarding assessments of capacity and best interests decision-making processes. The second was a lack of understanding of specific aspects of the Act itself, particularly the definition of “serious medical treatment” and in relation to Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation guidelines.

CIPOLD did not set out to specifically evaluate adherence to the MCA. It may be that there were other aspects relating to the MCA that were of note, but were not directly related to the deaths of individuals.

Addressing the findings of the Confidential Inquiry in relation to the understanding of, and adherence to, the MCA requires action at national, local and individual levels. Safeguarding is everyone's responsibility, and in challenging decision-making processes that are not aligned with the MCA, the authors are just as effectively protecting people with ID as are when the authors report wilful neglect or abuse.

CIPOLD undertook a retrospective, detailed investigation into the sequence of events leading to the deaths of people with ID. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that such research has associated a lack of adherence to the MCA to premature deaths within a safeguarding framework.

The purpose of this paper is to “read across” a sample of domestic homicide reviews (DHRs), mental health homicide reviews (MHHRs) and adult practice reviews (APR) to identify the cross-cutting themes.

The study involved a qualitative comparative analysis of 20 Welsh reviews: 10 DHRs, 6 APRs and 4 MHHRs. Each review was triple coded by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers (representing criminology, social work and law).

Five overarching themes were identified from this diverse sample of cases: crossing boundaries, including transitions between services and geographical boundaries; hoodwinking, where there was manipulation of the presentation of self; faulty assessment, which was not always holistic and only based on certain aspects of behaviour; tunnel vision, resulting from the initial underpinning narrative rarely being challenged; and knowledge, with certain types being privileged over others, especially professional over that of families and para-professionals.

Further research into death reviews should adopt a comparative, multi-disciplinary approach.

The research highlights the possibility for duplication across the different types of reviews. Further, it suggests that review processes could be streamlined.

Five cross-cutting themes have been developed through the very first study “reading across” three types of reviews (DHRs, APRs and MHHRs). Findings suggest the need for streamlining review processes and highlight the importance of adopting a multi-disciplinary perspective when researching death reviews.

The victim’s rights movement and restorative justice (RJ) have gained momentum around the world. More laws and policies have focused on crime victims and their families. Western literature suggests that the victim’s family suffers physical, emotional, and financial tolls and that the power of the victim’s family in pursuing justice for their loved ones remains limited. This is particularly concerning within the political and legal context of the abolitionist movement, innocence project, and human rights groups’ campaigns against police torture. Grounded in the perspectives of RJ and Chinese legal culture, this study examines the victim’s family, represented by Ding and senior Yu, of the Nian Bin capital murder case. Drawing on published reports and using the thematic content analysis method, this study examines the following aspects of victim’s family in a death penalty case: 1) victim family’s physical, emotional, and financial tolls; 2) victims’ family and the criminal justice system; 3) victims’ family and the media; and 4) the relationship between the victims’ and the accused’s families. This study concludes with discussions of the competing goals of families impacted by a crime and RJ practices that would help mitigate the loss of the victim’s family and enhance their confidence in the criminal justice system.

This chapter discusses the experiences of black men who encounter the phenomena of a mental health diagnosis, detention and death in a forensic setting in England. Although there are black women with mental health issues who have also died in forensic settings, the occurrence is significantly higher for men who become demonised as ‘Big, Black, Bad and dangerous’. The author discusses the historical over representation of mental ill health amongst black people in the general community and the plethora or reasons attributed to this. The author then discusses the various points of entry into the criminal justice system, where black men with mental health issues are over represented. The author explores some inquiries into the deaths of black men in custody and the recommendations that were subsequently made, which successive governments have failed to act upon. The author argues that the term ‘Institutional Racism’ is insufficient to explain this phenomenon; and offers her own theoretical interpretation which is a combination of systemic racism influenced by post-colonial conceptualisation

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has led to drastic changes in the lives of customers. Social isolation, financial difficulties, fear of being infected and many other factors have caused the psychological well-being of customers to deteriorate. By taking up the role of online reviews in the regulation of consumers’ moods, this study aims to examine the changes that have occurred in online product ratings, as well as the negative tone and word counts of product reviews during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study examines the online reviews of 321 products in the pre-COVID, immediate COVID and extended COVID periods. This paper compares the changes that have taken place in product evaluations via various analysis of variance analyses. The authors also test the effect of COVID-related deaths on product evaluations via regression analyses.

The results indicate that online product ratings decreased sharply just after the outbreak of COVID-19. The study also found that the tone of reviews was found to be more negative and the length of reviews appeared to be longer in comparison to the pre-COVID-19 period. The results also revealed that the product type (experience vs search) moderated the effect of the pandemic in online reviews and the impact of COVID-19 on online product reviews diminished in the later stages of the ongoing pandemic.

Managers should be aware of the detrimental impact of pandemics on online product reviews and be more responsive to customer problems during the early stages of pandemics.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that analyzes the effects of a pandemic on online product ratings and review content. As such, this study offers a timely contribution to the marketing literature.