Recent policy initiatives in early childhood and the challenges for the social work profession

The Labour Government in the UK has announced, as part of its launch of The Children's Plan, that it 'wants to make this country the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up' in. This latest Plan is further evidence of the surge of interest that there has been in children (and, in particular, early childhood) over the last ten years in the UK and indeed elsewhere. Many of the recent policy and practice initiatives have implications for social workers working with young children. Yet, social work as a profession, in comparison with education, has remained relatively silent on these initiatives and it is hard to find any critical analysis of these developments in terms of either their underlying discourses or their implications for social workers. This article sets out to address these gaps by providing a critical analysis of: what types of knowledge regarding the early years have gained political currency; why and how this is the case; and what the implications are for the role and practices of social workers. The article proposes that discourses of 'need' and 'provision' mask more powerful discourses of economics, social control and risk avoidance, and it concludes by advocating more critically reflexive social work practice with young children and their families.

Healthcare professionals’ attitudes towards traumatic brain injury (TBI): The influence of profession, experience, aetiology and blame on prejudice towards survivors of brain injury

Primary objective: To investigate the attitudes of healthcare professionals towards individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and their relationship to intended healthcare behaviour.

Research design: An independent groups design utilized four independent variables; aetiology, group, blame and gender to explore attitudes towards survivors of brain injury. The dependent variables were measured using the Prejudicial Evaluation and Social Interaction Scale (PESIS) and Helping Behaviour Scale (HBS).

Methods and procedures: A hypothetical vignette based methodology was used. Four hundred and sixty participants (131 trainee nurses, 94 qualified nurses, 174 trainee doctors, 61 qualified doctors) were randomly allocated to one of six possible conditions.

Main outcomes and results: Regardless of aetiology, if an individual is to blame for their injury, qualified healthcare professionals have more prejudicial attitudes than those entering the profession. There is a significant negative relationship between prejudice and helping behaviour for qualified healthcare professionals.

Conclusions: Increased prejudicial attitudes of qualified staff are related to a decrease in intended helping behaviour, which has the potential to impact negatively on an individual's recovery post-injury.

Teaching and Learning Guide for 'Modern Problems of Editing...'

Companion piece to my earlier article in Literature Conmpass: 'Modern Problems of Editing: The Two Texts of Doctor Faustus'. Provides a model for a module based on the topic of that article.

The Association of Distress and Sleeping Problems With Physicians' Intentions To Change Profession: The Moderating Effect of Job Control

The present study examined whether job control moderated the association between stress indicators (distress and sleeping problems) and intentions to change profession among 2,650 Finnish physicians. Ordinal logistic regression analysis was applied. The authors found that high levels of distress and sleeping problems were associated with higher levels of intentions to change profession, whereas high job control was associated with lower levels of intentions to change profession even after adjusting for the effects of gender, age, and employment sector. In addition, high job control was able to mitigate the positive association that distress and sleeping problems had with intentions to change profession. Our findings highlight the importance of offering more job control to physicians to prevent unnecessary physician turnover.