Information sharing and reporting systems in the UK and Ireland: Professional barriers to reporting child maltreatment concerns

Across the UK recent policy developments have focused on improved information sharing and inter-agency cooperation. Professional non-reporting of child maltreatment concerns has been consistently highlighted as a problem in a range of countries and the research literature indicates that this can happen for a variety of reasons. Characteristics such as the type of abuse and the threshold of evidence available are key factors, as are concerns that reporting will damage the professional-client relationship. Professional discipline can also impact on willingness to report, as can personal beliefs about abuse, attitudes towards child protection services and experiences of court processes. Research examining the role of organisational factors in information sharing and reporting emphasises the importance of training and there are some positive indications that training can increase professional awareness of reporting processes and requirements and help to increase knowledge of child abuse and its symptoms. Nonetheless, this is a complex issue and the need for training to go beyond simple awareness raising is recognised. In order to tackle non-reporting in a meaningful way, childcare professionals need access to on-going multidisciplinary training which is specifically tailored to address the range of different factors which impact on reporting attitudes and behaviours.

The Library of Essays on Law and Privacy

Privacy has now become a major topic not only in law but in computing, psychology, economics and social studies, and the explosion in scholarship has made it difficult for the student to traverse the field and identify the significant issues across the many disciplines. This series brings together a collection of significant papers with a multi-disciplinary approach which enable the reader to navigate through the complexities of the issues and make sense of the prolific scholarship published in this field.

The three volumes in this series address different themes: an anthropological approach to what privacy means in a cultural context; the issue of state surveillance where the state must both protect the individual and protect others from that individual and also protect itself; and, finally, what privacy might mean in a world where government and commerce collect data incessantly. The regulation of privacy is continually being called for and these papers help enable understanding of the ethical rationales behind the choices made in the sphere of regulation of privacy.

The articles presented in each of these collections have been chosen for the quality of their scholarship and their utility to the researcher, and feature a variety of approaches. The articles which debate the technical context of privacy are accessible to those from the arts and humanities; overall, the breadth of approach taken in the choice of articles has created a series which is an invaluable and important resource for lecturers, researchers and student.

Self-disclosure decision making based on intimacy and privacy

Autonomous agents may encapsulate their principals' personal data attributes. These attributes may be disclosed to other agents during agent interactions, producing a loss of privacy. Thus, agents need self-disclosure decision-making mechanisms to autonomously decide whether disclosing personal data attributes to other agents is acceptable or not. Current self-disclosure decision-making mechanisms consider the direct benefit and the privacy loss of disclosing an attribute. However, there are many situations in which the direct benefit of disclosing an attribute is a priori unknown. This is the case in human relationships, where the disclosure of personal data attributes plays a crucial role in their development. In this paper, we present self-disclosure decision-making mechanisms based on psychological findings regarding how humans disclose personal information in the building of their relationships. We experimentally demonstrate that, in most situations, agents following these decision-making mechanisms lose less privacy than agents that do not use them. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Assessing family members' satisfaction with information sharing and communication during Hospital care at the end of life

Context: Despite the fact that most deaths occur in hospital, problems remain with how patients and families experience care at the end of life when a death occurs in a hospital. Objectives: (1) assess family member satisfaction with information sharing and communication, and (2) examine how satisfaction with information sharing and communication is associated with patient factors. Methods: Using a cross-sectional survey, data were collected from family members of adult patients who died in an acute care organization. Correlation and factor analysis were conducted, and internal consistency assessed using Cronbach's alpha. Linear regression was performed to determine the relationship among patient variables and satisfaction on the Information Sharing and Communication (ISC) scale. Results: There were 529 questionnaires available for analysis. Following correlation analysis and the dropping of redundant and conceptually irrelevant items, seven items remained for factor analysis. One factor was identified, described as information sharing and communication, that explained 76.3% of the variance. The questionnaire demonstrated good content and reliability (Cronbach's alpha 0.96). Overall, family members were satisfied with information sharing and communication (mean total satisfaction score 3.9, SD 1.1). The ISC total score was significantly associated with patient gender, the number of days in hospital before death, and the hospital program where the patient died. Conclusions: The ISC scale demonstrated good content validity and reliability. The ISC scale offers acute care organizations a means to assess the quality of information sharing and communication that transpires in care at the end of life. © Copyright 2013, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

The Geography of Conflict and Death in Belfast, Northern Ireland

The conflict known as the oTroubleso in Northern Ireland began during the late 1960s and is defined by political and ethno-sectarian violence between state, pro-state, and anti-state forces. Reasons for the conflict are contested and complicated by social, religious, political, and cultural disputes, with much of the debate concerning the victims of violence hardened by competing propaganda-conditioning perspectives. This article introduces a database holding information on the location of individual fatalities connected with the contemporary Irish conflict. For each victim, it includes a demographic profile, home address, manner of death, and the organization responsible. Employing geographic information system (GIS) techniques, the database is used to measure, map, and analyze the spatial distribution of conflict-related deaths between 1966 and 2007 across Belfast, the capital city of Northern Ireland, with respect to levels of segregation, social and economic deprivation, and interfacing. The GIS analysis includes a kernel density estimator designed to generate smooth intensity surfaces of the conflict-related deaths by both incident and home locations. Neighborhoods with high-intensity surfaces of deaths were those with the highest levels of segregation ( 90 percent Catholic or Protestant) and deprivation, and they were located near physical barriers, the so-called peacelines, between predominantly Catholic and predominantly Protestant communities. Finally, despite the onset of peace and the formation of a power-sharing and devolved administration (the Northern Ireland Assembly), disagreements remain over the responsibility and ocommemorationo of victims, sentiments that still uphold division and atavistic attitudes between spatially divided Catholic and Protestant populations.

Climate Change Mitigation and Intergenerational Justice

Existing climate change mitigation policies are particularly concerned with the reconciliation of two seemingly conflicting aims: environmental protection and economic efficiency. The normative principles underlying these policies meanwhile focus on two central ideas: fair burden-sharing and agents' responsibility. However, both existing policy instruments and their supporting philosophical principles are highly problematic in terms of intergenerational justice and truly effective climate change mitigation. Three competing conceptions for allocating and distributing the burdens of climate change mitigation (cap-and-trade schemes, carbon emission taxes, and personal ecological space quotas) and their compatibility with principles of intra- and intergenerational justice are analysed and evaluated. None of the proposed instruments is able to satisfy the demands of effective mitigation and egalitarian justice on its own, which suggests that existing proposals for the distribution of emission rights and climate change-related costs need to be supported by a thicker account of intergenerational justice.

Developing a best practice model for partnership practice between specialist palliative care and intellectual disability services: a mixed methods study

Background: The lack of access to good quality palliative care for people with intellectual disabilities is highlighted in the international literature. In response, more partnership practice in end-of-life care is proposed. 
Aim: This study aimed to develop a best practice model to guide and promote partnership practice between specialist palliative care and intellectual disability services. 
Design: A mixed methods research design involving two phases was used, underpinned by a conceptual model for partnership practice. 
Setting/participants: Phase 1 involved scoping end-of-life care to people with intellectual disability, based on self-completed questionnaires. In all, 47 of 66 (71.2%) services responded. In Phase 2, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a purposive sample recruited of 30 health and social care professionals working in intellectual disability and palliative care services, who had provided palliative care to someone with intellectual disability. For both phases, data were collected from primary and secondary care in one region of the United Kingdom. 
Results: In Phase 1, examples of good practice were apparent. However, partnership practice was infrequent and unmet educational needs were identified. Four themes emerged from the interviews in Phase 2: challenges and issues in end-of-life care, sharing and learning, supporting and empowering and partnership in practice. 
Conclusion: Joint working and learning between intellectual disability and specialist palliative care were seen as key and fundamental. A framework for partnership practice between both services has been developed which could have international applicability and should be explored with other services in end-of-life care.

A secure authentication and key management scheme for Wireless Sensors Network

In recent years, the adaptation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to application areas requiring mobility increased the security threats against confidentiality, integrity and privacy of the information as well as against their connectivity. Since, key management plays an important role in securing both information and connectivity, a proper authentication and key management scheme is required in mobility enabled applications where the authentication of a node with the network is a critical issue. In this paper, we present an authentication and key management scheme supporting node mobility in a heterogeneous WSN that consists of several low capabilities sensor nodes and few high capabilities sensor nodes. We analyze our proposed solution by using MATLAB (analytically) and by simulation (OMNET++ simulator) to show that it has less memory requirement and has good network connectivity and resilience against attacks compared to some existing schemes. We also propose two levels of secure authentication methods for the mobile sensor nodes for secure authentication and key establishment.

Can Civil Society Succeed Where Elites Have Failed in the War on Sectarianism? Towards an infinitely demanding politics for the North

Caught between the well-armed imaginations of paramilitary organisations competing for the hearts and minds of a divided population, and state engineering of a liberal peace, civil society's impact on Northern Ireland's identity politics was limited during the thirty-year conflict. Specifically, the community and voluntary sector itself has tended to replicate as much as it challenged patterns of segregation in many of its own structures. With plans set out in the Northern Ireland Executive's Programme for Government (2008-11) to engage civil society in opening a new era of ‘good relations’ work to counter sectarianism and racism, civil society organisations will face a complex terrain, facing scepticism about their contribution to peace-making before the Good Friday Agreement, and working in a post-Agreement environment marked by continuing elite and communal antagonism demonstrated by the crisis at the turn of 2009 over devolution of justice and policing powers to the Northern Ireland Executive. A significant aspect of the resolution was a belated agreement by Sinn Fein and the DUP on a new community relation strategy, Cohesion, Sharing and Integration. This article suggests that civil society has a significant role to play in encouraging communities to confront the contradictions and tensions that continue to haunt the political architects of the Good Friday Agreement by affirming a radical and contingent vision of democracy as democratisation at a distance from the identity-saturated politics of the state-region of Northern Ireland. It draws on the work of Simon Critchley, Emmanuel Levinas and Wendy Brown, to offer an approach to identity politics in post-conflict Northern Ireland, focusing on the future orientation of civil society.

The Movebank data model for animal tracking

Studies of animal movement are rapidly increasing as tracking technologies make it possible to collect more data of a larger variety of species. Comparisons of animal movement across sites, times, or species are key to asking questions about animal adaptation, responses to climate and land-use change. Thus, great gains can be made by sharing and exchanging animal tracking data. Here we present an animal movement data model that we use within the Movebank web application to describe tracked animals. The model facilitates data comparisons across a broad range of taxa, study designs, and technologies, and is based on the scientific questions that could be addressed with the data.