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This article addresses the need for health checks for people with learning disabilities as a proven route to identifying and tackling health inequalities, what health checks should look like (covering physical and mental health) and how they should be followed up, and how practices and primary care trusts (PCTs) can implement health checks, involving people with learning disabilities and family carers and drawing on the expertise of community learning disability teams. Experience from Wales and England of offering health checks is described, and some key learning points are drawn out. In particular we recommend the appointment of a strategic health facilitator to lead the introduction of health checks and to ensure that the results are used to improve the health and health care of the population of people with learning disabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain which employees choose to access occupational health checks (OHCs), their perceptions of the usefulness of information received and whether they choose to act on tailored advice provided.

In total, 253 hospital employees attended workplace OHC then completed online questionnaire survey.

Participants included new cases (80 per cent) and those who had accessed the service previously (20 per cent), all age categories (23-69 years) and all occupational groups, although the vast majority were in office-based sedentary job roles, nursing or allied health professions (AHP) (78.3 per cent). Almost half were overweight or obese (46.7 per cent); many reported existing health problems or family history of chronic disease. Participants perceived OHC s to be convenient, informative and useful for raising their awareness of health issues, reassurance and monitoring, early identification of potential health problems and signposting to appropriate services. Participants reported post-check dietary changes (41 per cent) and increases in physical activity (30 per cent); smokers reported quitting or cutting down (44 per cent) and those exceeding alcohol limits reported cutting frequency or units of consumption (48 per cent). More than half those advised to visit their GP complied (53 per cent).

Future studies should investigate the efficacy of OHCs and whether reported lifestyle changes are sustained in the long-term.

General health checks can be feasibly delivered in a multi-site hospital workplace setting with diverse appeal. Provision of tailored health information can help to raise health awareness and motivate health behaviour change or maintenance amongst hospital employees, including those reporting risk factors for chronic disease. Employees value the investment of healthcare organisations in the health and wellbeing of their workforce.

There is a need to increase access to HIV testing in the UK in male migrant communities. The purpose of this paper is to assess the uptake and acceptability of a workplace HIV testing intervention aimed at increasing access to testing in non-clinical settings.

A total of 20 health check events were delivered at 11 UK organisations employing male migrant workers. Intervention included HIV testing, cholesterol, BMI, blood glucose, blood pressure; tailored health advice; take-away resources; optional post-event text reminders about HIV and general health. Mixed-methods evaluation included exit questionnaires (n=771), follow-up text messages (n=465) and qualitative interviews (n=35) to assess event acceptability. Qualitative data were analysed thematically.

Attendees were 776 employees from 50 countries (51 per cent male; 30 per cent migrant workers). A total of 52 per cent of attendees undertook an HIV test (75 per cent were first-time testers). In total, 96 per cent considered HIV testing to be an acceptable element of workplace health checks; 79 per cent reported new health-related knowledge; 60 per cent of attendees opted for follow-up text messaging; 26 per cent of text respondents reported independently taking HIV test post-event. High acceptability and uptake of HIV testing was associated with convenience, opportunity taking (through removal of deliberation and intentional test-seeking), and normalisation of HIV testing within a general health check.

This study is the first to demonstrate that opt-in HIV testing can be successfully delivered in the workplace within a multi-component health check. The workplace is an effective means of increasing access to HIV testing in groups at risk for HIV, including male migrant workers.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how loneliness and other mental health problems in older local authority housing tenants can be identified and addressed.

A tenancy health check form to identify health and well-being issues was developed by housing and public health for use in a rolling programme of housing officer visits to elderly tenants. This form facilitated enquiries on loneliness, social isolation and mental health as part of a supportive conversation. Individuals identified as being lonely were signposted to a range of community activities and social groups, and for some, ongoing support via telephone was provided by the housing officer.

The tenancy health check helped identify loneliness in this population group and enabled signposting to an increased number of local community activities. In addition to improved individual well-being, social capital has been strengthened through the creation of community networks.

Use of a health check form during housing officer visits provides a low-cost means of identifying health and well-being issues in vulnerable populations and facilitates adoption of making every contact count approaches by social housing providers.

This case study demonstrates the scope to provide holistic support for social housing tenants through better connections between public sector and community organisations.

It is well documented that the health of people with learning disabilities is worse in many ways than that of the rest of the population, and their lives are shorter. The article reports on the results of a wide and diverse research programme, including reviews of the relevant literature, consultation, area studies and an inquiry panel, designed to gather the most complete picture possible of these health inequalities and the aspects of health services that permit them. The areas covered are morbidity, access to services, diagnosis, health problems, health promotion, health checks and services for people from black and minority ethnic populations. Inequalities are found in all these areas, some arising from professional prejudice, some from inadequate responses to characteristics shown by learning‐disabled people and some from unidentified causes. The article concludes with a summary of the measures needed to rectify the situation.

Putting behavioural insights theory into practice a trial in Southwark using iPLATO Hub to communicate with over 13,000 patients concluded that the right combination of text messaging and letter content increased uptake of NHS Health Checks by 65 per cent. This iPLATO case study, based on a randomised controlled trial with the Department of Health, Public Health England and Southwark Council, reported in July 2015. The purpose of this paper is to spread best practice and help other parts of the country transform uptake to NHS Health Checks.

This research – led by the Department of Health and Southwark Council – was designed to test the impact of certain forms of communication informed by insights from behavioural science. These insights involved small, pragmatic and very low cost or free changes to the invitation process, for example, how messages are framed and the language used. These changes are designed to fit within existing practice, which means they can easily be scaled up across all CCGs.

Results from the trial also indicate that a combination of the deadline commitment letter and just a reminder text message (no primer message) was nearly as effective as two texts, while the new letters on their own (without any text messages) increased uptake to 21 per cent. This suggests that clear and concise text messages from the iPLATO Hub delivered the major impact on uptake.

iPLATO is working with the research group to expand the research and improve on the reported findings while helping to spread best practice across the NHS.

People living with severe mental illness (PLWSMI) experience disproportionately high rates of morbidity and mortality compared with the general population. Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) introduced the Living Well, Living Longer integrated care program in 2013 to address this inequity. This paper reports on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the provision of physical health interventions to community mental health consumers in SLHD.

Rates of COVID-19 vaccinations were collated. Routinely collected service data were reviewed for changes in rates of metabolic monitoring, mental health shared care, physical health checks, cardiometabolic health clinic assessments and diet and exercise interventions.

91.9% of consumers received at least two COVID-19 vaccinations and 61.3% received a booster. However, there was a 37.3% reduction in rates of metabolic monitoring, 20.1% reduction in Mental Health Shared Care agreements, 60.6% reduction in physical health checks with general practitioners, 65.4% reduction in cardiometabolic clinic assessments and 19.8% reduction of diet and exercise interventions.

The impact of the pandemic may lead to an exacerbation of poorly managed comorbid disease and increased premature mortality in people living with severe mental illness. Service providers should consider the local impact of the pandemic on the provision of physical health interventions and ensure steps are taken to address any deficits.

There is a paucity of published analysis regarding the impact of the pandemic on the provision of physical health interventions to people living with severe mental illness.

The purpose of this paper is to summarise the findings of a desk-based international review investigating the checking of staff and volunteers working with adults who are vulnerable or at risk (or similarly defined) receiving social care in their own homes, or in day centres or residential care.

In England, as part of the government’s attempts to prevent harm to vulnerable people, employers must check if their staff or volunteers are barred from working with vulnerable adults in the health and care sectors or if they have a relevant criminal record. This review sought to explore practices elsewhere, with a view to informing policy and practice debates. The review was undertaken in winter 2014-2015. It mainly involved a search of internet-based material and databases. This was further informed by communications with experts and practitioners from different countries.

The review found a variety of practices, ranging from no checks to substantial checks involving fingerprinting. Reasons for checks identified in different national contexts extend from efforts to stop fraudulent use of government subsidies to minimising the risk of harm to vulnerable adults, and more positively to enhance user and public trust in care providers. A small number of countries place particular emphasis on the rights of individuals to privacy and rehabilitation and this moral imperative overrides other policy goals. This review highlighted a lack of clarity in publicly available documents about the potentially multiple policy goals of different schemes and suggests that there may be advantages to clarifying the options available from other countries.

This review was confined to English language material and to material located through internet searching. Some material may not have been updated on internet sites.

The details of the processes have not previously been collated to the best of the authors’ knowledge.

Research Governance has been introduced to regulate research involving National Health Service (NHS) patients and staff but the process is lengthy and bureaucratic and has improved little since its introduction. The paper seeks to investigate changes over time.

A comparison between two studies, one in 2003‐2004 and the second in 2004‐2005, provided the opportunity of observing the process of Research Governance as it was developing. Both studies included postal questionnaire surveys and interviews with study participants.

In order to achieve Research Governance approval, application forms have to be completed, reviews undertaken, sponsors and indemnity information identified and honorary contracts from individual PCTs applied for. Honorary contracts can require references and health and Criminal Records Bureau checks. The process reduces the time available for research and employs large numbers of people, yet is still inefficient. Some of the requirements reduce the quality of the research and researchers' rights are marginalised.

The studies took place in a rapidly changing research environment. Further studies should continue to assess the situation and report any progress in making Research Governance less onerous for researchers.

There is an urgent requirement to investigate how procedures can be simplified and made less bureaucratic and costly, and to protect the rights of researchers. Without this, primary care research will be seriously disadvantaged and may become impossible to pursue.

The study compares process over time and shows that achieving Research Governance approval is seriously limiting research in primary care.

Fog computing (FC) is a new field of research and has emerged as a complement to the cloud, which can mitigate the problems inherent to the cloud computing (CC) and internet of things (IoT) model such as unreliable latency, bandwidth constraints, security and mobility. Because there is no comprehensive study on the FC in health management processing systems techniques, this paper aims at surveying and analyzing the existing techniques systematically as well as offering some suggestions for upcoming works.

The paper complies with the methodological requirements of systematic literature reviews (SLR). The present paper investigates the newest systems and studies their practical techniques in detail. The applications of FC in health management systems have been categorized into three major groups, including review articles, data analysis, frameworks and models mechanisms.

The results have indicated that despite the popularity of FC as having real-time processing, low latency, dynamic configuration, scalability, low reaction time (less than a second), high bandwidth, battery life and network traffic, a few issues remain unanswered, such as security. The most recent research has focused on improvements in remote monitoring of the patients, such as less latency and rapid response. Also, the results have shown the application of qualitative methodology and case study in the use of FC in health management systems. While FC studies are growing in the clinical field, CC studies are decreasing.

This study aims to be comprehensive, but there are some limitations. This research has only surveyed the articles that are mined, according to a keyword exploration of FC health, FC health care, FC health big data and FC health management system. Fog-based applications in the health management system may not be published with determined keywords. Moreover, the publications written in non-English languages have been ignored. Some important research studies may be printed in a language other than English.

The results of this survey will be valuable for academicians, and these can provide visions into future research areas in this domain. This survey helps the hospitals and related industries to identify FC needs. Moreover, the disadvantages and advantages of the above systems have been studied, and their key issues have been emphasized to develop a more effective FC in health management processing mechanisms over IoT in the future.

Previous literature review studies in the field of SLR have used a simple literature review to find the tasks and challenges in the field. In this study, for the first time, the FC in health management processing systems is applied in a systematic review focused on the mediating role of the IoT and thereby provides a novel contribution. An SLR is conducted to find more specific answers to the proposed research questions. SLR helps to reduce implicit researcher bias. Through the adoption of broad search strategies, predefined search strings and uniform inclusion and exclusion criteria, SLR effectively forces researchers to search for studies beyond their subject areas and networks.