Impact of persistent substance misuse on 1-year outcome in first-episode psychosis

Background: Substance misuse is a common comorbid problem in people presenting with first-episode psychosis and is associated with a poor short-term outcome.

Aims: The aim of this study is to examine differences in baseline characteristics and 1-year outcome between individuals with first-episode psychosis who have never misused substances, those who stop misusing substances after initial presentation and those who persistently misuse substances over the 1-year assessment period.

Method: Patients were recruited to the Northern Ireland First Episode Psychosis Study (n=272). Clinical assessments were performed at baseline and at 1 year (n=194) and data were collected from the case notes.

Results: Individuals with persistent substance misuse had more severe depression, more positive symptoms, poorer functional outcome and greater rates of relapse at 1 year than those who stopped and those who had never misused substances. There were no differences in outcome between people who had never misused substances and those who stopped misusing after presentation.

Conclusions: These results support assertive intervention targeted at comorbid substance misuse in individuals with first-episode psychosis.

Where do parents go for feeding advice in the first year?

Health visiting services have been restructured from being universal for all children to targeting families in need. UK recommendations on infant feeding have also recently changed. With the many sources of information available on feeding babies, it is important to know where parents get feeding advice and which sources they find valuable. In this study, 215 mothers of one-year old infants were interviewed about where they had obtained feeding advice in the first year of their infant’s life and how useful they found this information. The health visitor was the most commonly cited source of information (70%) followed by grandparents (53%), while 10% of mothers relied solely on health visitor advice. This study highlights the importance placed by mothers on health visitors, which may have implications for the service in the midst of the reorganisation of the health visitor’s role.

The First Year of the UK's Supreme Court

This article reviews the judgments issued by the UK Supreme Court during the first year of its existence (October 2009 - September 2010) and assesses how the modus operandi of the new court differs from that of its predecessor, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords.

Perceptions of authorial identity in academic writing among undergraduate accounting students: implications for unintentional plagiarism

The current study explores first, second and third year UK accounting students’ perceptions of authorial identity and their implications for unintentional plagiarism. The findings suggest that whilst all students have reasonably positive perceptions of their authorial identity, there is room for improvement. Significant differences in second year students’ perceptions were reported for some positive aspects of authorial identity. However, results for negative aspects show that second year students find it significantly more difficult to express accounting in their own words than first and third years. Furthermore, second years are significantly more afraid than first years that what they write will look unimpressive. Finally, the results for approaches to writing, which also have implications for unintentional plagiarism, revealed that students across all years appear to adopt aspects of top-down, bottom-up and pragmatic approaches to writing. Emerging from these findings, the study offers suggestions to accounting educators regarding authorial identity instruction.

Understanding Parental Influence on Educational Outcomes Among 9 Year Olds in Ireland: The Mediating Role of Resources, Attitudes and Children's Own Perspectives

The relationship between parental background and children's educational outcomes has been a dominant theme within the sociology of education. There has been an on-going debate as to the relative merits of explanations which focus on the role of socio-cultural reproduction and those which focus on rational choice. However, many empirical studies within the social stratification tradition fail to allow for children's own agency in shaping the relationship between social background and schooling outcomes. This paper draws on the first wave of a large-scale longitudinal study of over 8,000 nine-year-old children in Ireland, which combines information from parents, school principals, teachers and children themselves. Both social class and parental education are found to have significant effects on reading and mathematics test scores among nine year olds. These effects are partly mediated by home-based educational resources and activities, parents' educational expectations for their child, and parents' formal involvement in the school. More importantly, children's own engagement with, and attitudes to, school significantly influence their academic performance. The influence of children's own attitudes and actions can thus reinforce or mitigate the effect of social background factors. The analysis therefore provides a bridge between the large body of research on the intergenerational transmission of inequality and the emerging research and policy literature on children's rights.

Web-assisted first-year undergraduate teaching in engineering

A software system, recently developed by the authors for the efficient capturing, editing, and delivery of audio-visual web lectures, was used to create a series of lectures for a first-year undergraduate course in Dynamics. These web lectures were developed to serve as an extra study resource for students attending lectures and not as a replacement. A questionnaire was produced to obtain feedback from students. The overall response was very favorable and numerous requests were made for other lecturers to adopt this technology. Despite the students' approval of this added resource, there was no significant improvement in overall examination performance

Description and predictors of hospital costs of oesophageal cancer during the first year following diagnosis in Northern Ireland

The cost-effectiveness of novel interventions in the treatment of cancer is well researched; however, relatively little attention is paid to the cost of many aspects of routine care. Oesophageal cancer is the ninth most common cancer in the UK and sixth most common cause of cancer death. It usually presents late and has a poor prognosis. The hospital costs incurred by oesophageal cancer patients diagnosed in Northern Ireland in 2005 (n = 198) were determined by review of medical records. The average cost of hospital care per patient in the 12 months from presentation was £7847. Variations in total hospital costs by age at diagnosis, gender, cancer stage, histological type, mortality at 1 year, co-morbidity count and socio-economic status were analysed using multiple regression analyses. Higher costs were associated with earlier stages of cancer and cancer stage remained a significant predictor of costs after controlling for cancer type, patient age and mortality at 1 year. Thus, although early detection of cancer usually improves survival, this would mean increased costs in the first year. Deprivation achieved borderline significance with those from more deprived areas having lower resource consumption relative to the more affluent. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.