Search results

The aim of this paper is to describe the development of a suite of social inclusion outcome measures and how they are being applied in practice within Stockport.

The paper gives a description of the development approach; the development of the measures and how the data collection systems have been established.

A suite of practical measures of social inclusion has been developed that are being used to inform local service delivery, commissioning and service redesign with the purpose of evidencing the effectiveness of provision in delivering social inclusion for people who have used mental health services in Stockport.

The paper does not contain data. It is anticipated that the data will inform a business case for commissioning in new ways and which may be the subject of a further paper.

The paper describes the practical approaches that have led to the development of the measures.

The measures will be able to demonstrate the social impact of services for people who use them.

Mental health services are striving to develop meaningful measures that are embedded in day‐to‐day practice and are meaningful to people who use services. These measures and the way they are being used in services will provide evidence to service commissioners of effectiveness and have been signed off as such by commissioners. The outcomes framework will have implications locally for the implementation of payment by results in mental health.

Commissioning has been a central plank of health and social care policy in England for many years now, yet there are still debates about how effective it is in delivering improvements in care and outcomes. Social inclusion of people with experience of mental health is one of the goals that commissioners would like to help services to improve but such a complex outcome for people can often be undermined by contractual arrangements that fragment service responses rather than deliver holistic support. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a form of commissioning, Alliance Contracting, and how it has been allied with a Social Inclusion Outcomes Framework (SIOF) in Stockport to begin to improve services and outcomes.

The paper is a conceptual discussion and case description of the use of Alliance Contracts to improve recovery services and social inclusion in mental health care in one locality.

The paper finds that the Alliance Contracting approach fits well with the SIOF and is beginning to deliver some promising results in terms of improving services.

This is a case study of one area and, as such, it is hard to generalise beyond that.

The paper discusses a promising approach for commissioners to develop locally to guide service improvements and better social inclusion outcomes for people.

Rather than developing good services but fractured pathways of care across providers and teams, the Alliance Contracting approach potentially delivers more holistic and flexible pathways that ought to better help individuals in their recovery journeys.

This is the first paper to set out the use of Alliance Contracting and social inclusion measures to help improve services and outcomes for people experiencing mental health problems.

Pat Allatt is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Teesside, U.K.Tim Dant is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of East Anglia, U.K.Carolyn Dixon is a researcher and an independent artist.John Donnelly is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology and Criminology Division at the University of Northumbria, U.K.Alan Felstead is Professor of Employment Studies at the Centre for Labour Market Studies at the University of Leicester, U.K.Barbara Harrison is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, U.K.Rosalind Hurworth is Director of the Centre for Program Evaluation within the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia.Nick Jewson is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Labour Market Studies at the University of Leicester, U.K.John Martin is Principal Lecturer in Economic and Social History at De Montfort University, U.K.Ruth Martin was the Research Assistant for the “Asian Leicester” project.Sarah Pink is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Loughborough, U.K.Christopher Pole is a Reader in the Department of Sociology at the University of Leicester, U.K.Andrea Raggl is a Research Assistant in the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.Michael Schratz is Professor of Education at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research of the University of Innsbruck, Austria.Matt Smith is a Lecturer in the Sociology and Criminology Division at the University of Northumbria, U.K.Sally Walters is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Labour Market Studies at the University of Leicester, U.K.

Individuals living in areas of higher deprivation are more likely to have requested mental health treatment but are less likely to have received treatment or benefitted from it. Less is known about the extent of access equality and treatment outcomes for individuals with a long-term health condition who experience mental health difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which the neighbourhood Index of Multiple Deprivation predicted access to treatment, appointment attendance, treatment completion and clinical outcomes in a British health psychology clinic.

Retrospective data were used from 479 individuals referred to a health psychology clinic over 12 months. Clinical outcomes were measured using the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation – Outcome Measure. Patient data were linked with their neighbourhood Index of Multiple Deprivation decile. Data were analysed using correlation, linear regression and Fisher’s exact test.

There were no significant associations between deprivation and whether an individual attended assessment, attended treatment or completed treatment or between deprivation and patients’ clinical outcomes. Exploratory evidence indicated that individuals from higher deprivation neighbourhoods may be over-represented in clinic referrals, and individuals from lower deprivation neighbourhoods may be under-represented, compared with local population distribution estimates.

This evaluation provides insights into treatment outcomes and deprivation in those with physical health difficulties. Further evaluation using a larger sample and comparing referrals with local prevalence estimates of comorbid mental and physical health problems would enable greater confidence in the conclusion that no evidence of inequality on the basis of neighbourhood deprivation was found.

Globally millions of children have a parent who is imprisoned. Research suggests that this has an adverse impact on the child and imprisonment of a parent is considered to be an adverse childhood experience (ACE). Parental incarceration will not only affect the child but the entire household and may result in further ACEs such as household dysfunction and parental separation making this group of children particularly vulnerable. This scoping review aims to adopt an international perspective to comprehensively examine the extent range and nature of literature both published and grey relating to parental incarceration and the potential impact on children’s emotional and mental health.

In this scoping review, the five stages identified by Arksey and O’Malley (2005) were used including identifying the research question, identifying relevant studies, study selection, charting data, collating, summarising and reporting results. In addition, the included studies were appraised for quality using methodology-specific tools. A critical narrative synthesis was adopted to present findings and discussion.

Nine studies met the inclusion criteria. Of the included studies, eight were retrieved from peer-reviewed journals and one from grey literature searching. Five categories with subcategories were identified affecting children’s mental health: 1) Relationships: parent and incarcerated child relationship; facilitators and barriers to maintaining contact; 2) Family structure; maternal or paternal incarceration; living arrangements during parental incarceration; 3) Children’s emotions: emotional recognition and regulation; resilience; 4) Prison stigma: social stigma; shame and secrecy; 5) Structural disadvantages: poverty; race/ethnicity.

This scoping review has highlighted how the imprisonment of a parent negatively affects their children’s emotional and mental health. Factors negatively impacting children’s emotional and mental health are interrelated and complex. Further research is required, including differences between paternal and maternal incarceration; impact of gender and age of child; poverty as an ACE and prison exacerbating this; and effects of ethnicity and race. An important policy direction is in developing an effective way of capturing the parental status of a prisoner to ensure that the child and family receive needed support.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether official inquiries are an effective method for holding the medical profession to account for failings in the quality and safety of care.

Through a review of the theoretical literature on professions and documentary analysis of key public inquiry documents and reports in the UK National Health Service (NHS) the authors examine how the misconduct of doctors can be understood using the metaphor of professional wrongdoing as a product of bad apples, bad barrels or bad cellars.

The wrongdoing literature tends to present an uncritical assumption of increasing sophistication in analysis, as the focus moves from bad apples (individuals) to bad barrels (organisations) and more latterly to bad cellars (the wider system). This evolution in thinking about wrongdoing is also visible in public inquiries, as analysis and recommendations increasingly tend to emphasise cultural and systematic issues. Yet, while organisational and systemic factors are undoubtedly important, there is a need to keep in sight the role of individuals, for two key reasons. First, there is growing evidence that a small number of doctors may be disproportionately responsible for large numbers of complaints and concerns. Second, there is a risk that the role of individual professionals in drawing attention to wrongdoing is being neglected.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first theoretical and empirical study specifically exploring the role of NHS inquiries in holding the medical profession to account for failings in professional practice.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a drought which initially affects agricultural productivity can ultimately affect an entire economy. The study aims to assess the magnitude of the impact as well as highlight key issues that can inform the implementation of drought mitigation programmes.

The paper presents the literature on the economic impact of drought and uses a computable general equilibrium model where productivity shocks are applied to the agricultural industries following which the resulting impacts on the rest of the sectors of the economy are obtained.

The findings show that the key macroeconomic variables, namely, real GDP, industry output, employment, the trade balance and household consumption are negatively affected by the drought shock.

The results point to the fact that in the absence of drought mitigation mechanisms, the occurrence of even a short drought as modelled in this paper can impose substantial socioeconomic losses.

First, a general equilibrium framework which uses climate and economic data when evaluating the social-economic impacts of drought is used. Most studies employ partial equilibrium analysis in analysing drought impacts on specific sectors or crops within a limited geographical area. Others use global or multi-regional models which impose averages on the observed impacts. The current study provides valuable insights on the potential damage which droughts can impose on a single economy. This gives a basis for decision making to support drought mitigation policies and programmes.