Regional Health and Social Care Personal and Public Involvement Forum: Annual Update Report 2013/14

The Regional HSC PPI Annual Report for 2013/14 provides an up-date of the work of the Forum and outlines the key areas that have been progressed including the development of PPI standards and the advancement of a generic PPI awareness raising and training programme.

Regional Guidelines for management of patients absent Without Leave (AWOL)

The overarching purpose of these guidelines is to promote the safety and protection of service users and others in the event of a service user going missing or Absent Without Leave (AWOL). The guidelines provide a framework for all staff when it is determined that a service user is absent without leave.

Historical review: Negative efficacy and the constitutive activity of G-protein-coupled receptors.

The idea that a receptor can produce signalling without agonist intervention and that several antagonists can be 'active' in repressing such spontaneous activity is contained in the concept of ligand-induced conformational changes. Yet, this idea was neglected by pharmacologists for many years. In this article, we review the events that brought inverse agonism and constitutive activity to general attention and made this phenomenon a topic of current research. We also suggest a classification of antagonists based on the cooperativity that links their primary site of interaction with other functional domains of the receptor.