Consultation on 'Co-operating to safeguard children and young people in Northern Ireland'

This draft policy has been updated to reflect changes in structures and legislation. The draft policy outlines how communities, organisations and individuals must work to ensure children and young people in Northern Ireland are safeguarded as effectively as possible. Consultation Documents Draft Co-operating to Safeguard Children and Young People (PDF 356KB) Draft Co-operating to Safeguard Children and Young People (MS WORD 463KB) Co-operating to Safeguard Children and Young People - (easy read) (PDF 15MB) Preliminary Equality Screening, Disability Duties and Human Rights Assessment (PDF 99KB) Regulatory Impact Assessment, and Rural proofing Assessments (PDF 37KB)   Consultation Response Questionnaire Consultation Response Questionnaire (MS Word 38KB)   How to respond to the consultation Please use the questionnaire to tell us your views on the draft policy. An Equality Impact Assessment, a Regulatory Impact Assessment and Rural Proofing templates are attached in respect of the draft policy. The deadline for responses is 5.00 pm on 21 August 2015. Please email the questionnaire response to: Child.Safeguarding@dhsspsni.gov.uk Or post it to: DHSSPSNIChild Safeguarding Policy TeamRoom A3.5Castle BuildingsStormont EstateBelfastBT4 3SQ The Department will consider requests to produce this document in other languages or in alternative formats – Braille, audio, large print or as a PDF document. If you require the document in these or other formats please contact us using the details provided above or telephone 02890522543.

Policy for the Provision and Management of Cleaning Services (PDF 464KB)

This policy sets out the Department’s commitment to maintaining and improving environmental cleanliness in Northern Ireland (NI). It has been developed with the aim that best management practice, staff training and continued monitoring of performance will lead to services being maintained and improved in a challenging financial climate. The detail of the policy is presented in the three sections which follow this executive summary. Section 1 – Introduction and Background. This section sets out the aims, objectives and scope of the policy. It also sets out the key principles which should apply to cleaning services. Section 2 - Developments since the launch of Cleanliness Matters Strategy in October 2005. This outlines events and progress since 2005 and indicates how these are shaping the proposed strategic direction. Section 3 - The Way Forward. This section sets out the areas for attention over the coming years.  

Screening Diversity: Women & Work in Twenty-First-Century Popular Culture

Screening Diversity: Women and Work in Twenty-first Century Popular Culture explores contemporary representations of diverse professional women on screen. Audiences are offered successful women with limited concerns for feminism, anti-racism, or economic justice. I introduce the term viewsers to describe a group of movie and television viewers in the context of the online review platform Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Screening Diversity follows their engagement in a representative sample of professional women on film and television produced between 2007 and 2015. The sample includes the television shows, Scandal, Homeland, VEEP, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Wife, as well as the movies, Zero Dark Thirty, The Proposal, The Heat, The Other Woman, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Temptation. Viewsers appreciated female characters like Olivia (Scandal), and Maya (Zero Dark Thiry) who treated their work as a quasi-religious moral imperative. Producers and viewsers shared the belief that unlimited time commitment and personal identification were vital components of professionalism. However, powerful women, like The Proposal’s Margaret and VEEP’s Selina, were often called bitches. Some viewsers embraced bitch-positive politics in recognition of the struggles of women in power. Women’s disproportionate responsibility for reproductive labor, often compromises their ability to live up to moral standards of work. Unlike producers, viewsers celebrated and valued that labor. However, texts that included serious consideration of women as workers were frequently labelled chick flicks or soap operas. The label suggested that women’s labor issues were not important enough that they could be a topic of quality television or prestigious film, which bolstered the idea that workplace equality for women is not a problem in which the general public is implicated. Emerging discussions of racial injustice on television offered hope that these formations are beginning to shift.

Screening for drugs in oral fluid : illicit drug use and drug driving in a sample of urban and regional Queensland motorists

Police services in a number of Australian states and overseas jurisdictions have begun to implement or consider random road-side drug testing of drivers. This paper outlines research conducted to provide an estimate of the extent of drug driving in a sample of Queensland drivers in regional, rural and metropolitan areas. Oral fluid samples were collected from 2657 Queensland motorists and screened for illicit substances including cannabis (delta 9 tetrahydrocannibinol [THC]), amphetamines, ecstasy, and cocaine. Overall, 3.8% of the sample (n = 101) screened positive for at least one illicit substance, although multiple drugs were identified in a sample of 23 respondents. The most common drugs detected in oral fluid were ecstasy (n = 53), and cannabis (n = 46) followed by amphetamines (n = 23). A key finding was that cannabis was confirmed as the most common self-reported drug combined with driving and that individuals who tested positive to any drug through oral fluid analysis were also more likely to report the highest frequency of drug driving. Furthermore, a comparison between drug vs. drink driving detection rates for one region of the study, revealed a higher detection rate for drug driving (3.8%) vs. drink driving (0.8%). This research provides evidence that drug driving is relatively prevalent on Queensland roads, and may in fact be more common than drink driving. This paper will further outline the study findings’ and present possible directions for future drug driving research.

Development of a colorimetric assay for heparanase activity suitable for kinetic analysis and inhibitor screening

The role that heparanase plays during metastasis and angiogenesis in tumors makes it an attractive target for cancer therapeutics. Despite this enzyme’s significance, most of the assays developed to measure its activity are complex. Moreover, they usually rely on labeling variable preparations of the natural substrate heparan sulfate, making comparisons across studies precarious. To overcome these problems, we have developed a convenient assay based on the cleavage of the synthetic heparin oligosaccharide fondaparinux. The assay measures the appearance of the disaccharide product of heparanase-catalyzed fondaparinux cleavage colorimetrically using the tetrazolium salt WST-1. Because this assay has a homogeneous substrate with a single point of cleavage, the kinetics of the enzyme can be reliably characterized, giving a Km of 46 μM and a kcat of 3.5 s−1 with fondaparinux as substrate. The inhibition of heparanase by the published inhibitor, PI-88, was also studied, and a Ki of 7.9 nM was determined. The simplicity and robustness of this method, should, not only greatly assist routine assay of heparanase activity but also could be adapted for high-throughput screening of compound libraries, with the data generated being directly comparable across studies.