Irish dental practitioners perceived barriers to the care of patients with special healthcare needs and the effect of postgraduate training

Inequalities in oral healthcare service provision to people with special health needs have been reported in the Republic of Ireland. These include higher unmet dental treatment needs and longer waiting period to access routine dental treatment than the general population. Aim: The aims of this study were to determine the groups of patients with special needs which pose a challenge to manage in the dental surgery and to examine perceived barriers to the care of these patients. We aimed to determine whether postgraduate training in the management of these patients increases the practitioners’ frequency of treatment and their desire for further training in this area. Methods: A questionnaire was used to survey 326 randomly selected dentists from the Dental Council’s register of dentists. Questionnaire and information sheets explaining the purpose of the survey, confidentiality and anonymity of the responses were posted to the dentists. Results: The results showed that children with intellectual disability posed the biggest challenge for dentists to manage in the dental surgery. Behaviour management issues and the degree of disability were perceived by many dentists as factors that would have high effects on their willingness to treat patients with special needs. Dentists who have postgraduate training in the management of patients with special needs were significantly more willing to treat these patients and to seek additional training in the future. Conclusion: There are links between the training and the willingness of practitioners to undertake dental treatment or patients with special healthcare needs.

Geografia emocional d'un exode: La retirada republicana de 1939

This thesis proposes to trace and explore an emotional geography and cartography of the republican withdrawal at the end of the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia during the months of January and February 1939. Thus, it complements existing historiographical scholarship on the Spanish Civil War and Spanish Republican Exile, especially with regard to what was experienced in Catalan territory. However, its main purpose is not that of the historian, to reveal and explain unexplored stories, but to locate existing narratives, memoirs, journals and testimonies carefully in the landscape in which they took place, exposing their emotional bonds with the places and spaces of the withdrawal of the protagonists of the Republican exodus of 1939. Whilst there has been significant work in recent years to “recover” spaces associated with violent of traumatic memories of conflict and displacement, including the creation of a network of “Democratic Memory” places in Catalonia, the spaces explored in this thesis have not so far been construed as places of memory. In part, this is because of the diversity of emotions and affective responses they provoked and continue to evoke, but also because the geography of the Retirada is characterized by mobility and multiplicity. So instead of an historical approach, despite being influenced by Walter Benjamin's concept of history, this thesis draws on existing methods and approaches related to cultural geography, in particular, the emerging interdisciplinary field known as emotional geographies. In order to create a vision of La Retirada that is sensitive to its mobility and multiplicity, the primary methodology used has been that of interdisciplinary assemblage, juxtaposing images, documents and stories of past and present, in a process redolent of that which Marianne Hirsch calls "post-memory".