Legalities of treating wildlife in UK veterinary practice.

Many different species of wildlife will be presented to veterinary practices. In addition to providing care for these patients, veterinary nurses need to be aware of the legal aspects that apply. Legislation relating to wildlife species is particularly relevant to taking animals from the wild, keeping wild animals and birds in care, releasing them back into the wild and notifiable diseases. Following devolution, there are some differences in legislation in different parts of the UK. Specific species, particularly endangered species, have more detailed legislation which also needs to be adhered to. While lay people may have the best of intentions, they need to be aware that all veterinary care needs to follow Schedule 3 of the Veterinary Surgeon's Act 1966, and the best interests of the animals must be central to all care that is given.

Novel information sharing syntax for data sharing between police and community partners, using role-based security.

The exchange of information between the police and community partners forms a central aspect of effective community service provision. In the context of policing, a robust and timely communications mechanism is required between police agencies and community partner domains, including: Primary healthcare (such as a Family Physician or a General Practitioner); Secondary healthcare (such as hospitals); Social Services; Education; and Fire and Rescue services. Investigations into high-profile cases such as the Victoria Climbié murder in 2000, the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002, and, more recently, the death of baby Peter Connelly through child abuse in 2007, highlight the requirement for a robust information-sharing framework. This paper presents a novel syntax that supports information-sharing requests, within strict data-sharing policy definitions. Such requests may form the basis for any information-sharing agreement that can exist between the police and their community partners. It defines a role-based architecture, with partner domains, with a syntax for the effective and efficient information sharing, using SPoC (Single Point-of-Contact) agents to control in-formation exchange. The application of policy definitions using rules within these SPoCs is inspired by network firewall rules and thus define information exchange permissions. These rules can be imple-mented by software filtering agents that act as information gateways between partner domains. Roles are exposed from each domain to give the rights to exchange information as defined within the policy definition. This work involves collaboration with the Scottish Police, as part of the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (SIPR), and aims to improve the safety of individuals by reducing risks to the community using enhanced information-sharing mechanisms.