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LB706, introduced by Omaha Sen. Terrell McKinney, would require emergency dispatchers to screen incoming calls for signs of mental health-related issues, such as threatening self-harm or severe distress. Under the bill, if mental health concerns are present, the dispatcher would flag the call as a “mental health priority,” prompting dispatch of an APS social worker alongside an officer.

Dr. Barbra Teater leads a panel on different career choices for social workers.

Powerful lobbying has quietly exempted finance from an EU sustainability law, risking Europe’s environmental and human rights commitments.

Under the legislation, New Jersey would join an interstate agreement, known as the Social Work Licensure Compact, that would allow social workers licensed at the clinical and master’s levels here to practice in other states that are also members of the compact without obtaining multiple state licenses.

The new legislation essentially limits how much judges can reduce a prison sentence for mitigating factors (such as a guilty plea, young age or mental ability). A regulatory impact statement from the Ministry of Justice estimated it would result in 1,350 more people in prison. This and other law changes are effectively putting more people in prison for longer. By 2035, imprisonment numbers are expected to increase by 40% from their current levels, with significant cost implications.

Long believed to be particularly associated with males, new research is revolutionising our understanding of autism

“I can imagine the criticism we would receive if we had information about a very dangerous situation, potentially dangerous situation, that a child was about to be born into, and we said we should do nothing until that child is born,” Chris Winters, the department’s commissioner, said at the meeting.

The AMHP Leads Network, representing the Approved Mental Health Professionals of England and Wales has criticised the change, a position supported by the British Association of Social Workers. AMHP Leads Network Co-Chair Kirsten Bingham expressed grave concerns:

‘The proposal is deeply troubling and will have disastrous unintended consequences for both individuals in crisis and those responding to mental health emergencies. As the key decision maker under the Mental Health Act 1983, we strongly urge the House of Commons, to reject this amendment.

Lately, there have been many headlines on scientific fraud and journal article retractions. If this trend continues, it represents a serious threat to public trust in science. One way to tackle this problem – and ensure public trust in science remains high – may be to slow it down. We sometimes refer to this philosophy as slow science. Akin to the slow food movement, slow science prioritises quality over speed and seeks to buck incentive structures that promote mass production.

But Chua Hoi-wai, chief executive of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service and veteran policy advocate behind the setting up of the poverty commission, conceded that influencing the government had become more challenging, pointing to a paradigm shift in governance culture.

Michaela Raj, manager of the Emotional Wellbeing Team at Wakefield Council, reflects on winning the Children and Young People’s Champion category at the CYP Now Awards 2024.

If experience is a song, mood is the bassline. As your thoughts and sensations flow by, it’s your mood that provides the emotional undercurrent. It predisposes you to respond in certain ways to a dynamic and changing world. If you’re in a positive mood, a beautiful sunset pulses with awe and appreciation; a first sip of coffee hums with comfort amid the morning’s busy schedule. Conversely, if you’re in a bad mood, forgetting your wallet while shopping immediately introduces sharp notes of gloom and irritation.

Peer review as we know it arose in the mid 20th century as the demand for specialised research grew following the end of the second world war. Contrast this with the 18th and 19th centuries, when peer review was undertaken mainly by editors of learned societies and university publishing presses. Today, peer review is done largely by external peer reviewers who have been asked by a journal’s editor to conduct a review of a manuscript focusing on the quality and value of the research.

Members of the Crisis Response Team, which has police officers and social workers, who have expertise in mental health and de-escalation techniques, deployed together to respond to mental health and substance abuse issues within the city.

When a Veteran who has bravely served our country is without a home, there’s another kind of army standing by to help. Our team of social workers connects Veterans with the resources and support they earned through their service, putting them back on the path to housing and independence.

Since her teens, Anna Beecher used drinking as a gateway to sexual encounters, a mask for both her vulnerability and accountability. It took falling for someone in the sober light of day to realise what love was

Crashes on electric scooters are mostly due to the behavior of the riders, with one-handed steering and riding in a group being some of the largest risk factors. The researchers are also concerned about riders who deliberately crash or cause dangerous situations when riding, a phenomenon that seems to be specific to electric scooters.

The work has been grueling even as it has freed her; it is constant crisis, and it is easy to lose herself and disconnect from her body and her own needs. But the community she has built as an organizer is one that can hold her too when she needs it, a place where she has friends and care beyond her immediate family. A home.

He found that students who work more than 20 hours a week do significantly worse on tests and come to class less often; half of those low-attending students ended up failing his class, compared to just 7% of high-attending students.

The new political review centers on Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) announcements seeking applications for everything from investigator-initiated research to specific research topics and training grants…. NIH only published three NOFOs between 20 January and 26 March, compared with 163 in 2023 and 147 in 2024 between the same dates. A document seen by Science from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases says 27 out of the 41 NOFOs for grants it intended to award in the 2026 fiscal year remain unpublished.

Red Scare author Clay Risen sees parallels between 1950s witch-hunts and the right’s assault on government today

Jacintah McCaffrey’s nearly 25-year career in social work in Northern Ireland began in 2001 with her first role at a children’s residential home.

Labour’s Kim Leadbeater (above) has promised to work with fellow MPs to amend her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to ensure practitioners other than health professionals are allowed not to participate. While social workers were originally not part of the bill’s process for assisted dying, they have been added to it through amendments made by Leadbeater during its recently-concluded committee stage.

After a rocky start, François Bayrou held onto his position as prime minister in February by making France a promise. Trade unions and business lobbies, he said, would be able to hold a series of negotiations to hash out possible amendments to President Emmanuel Macron’s controversial 2023 reform to France’s retirement system. Adopted without a parliamentary vote, Macron’s pension law extracted savings solely on the backs of late-career workers, increasing the retirement age for public pensions from sixty-two to sixty-four while safeguarding employers and wealthy retirees from new charges.

The bill was introduced by Rep. Lori VanWinkle, R-Minot, who said people should have the right to seek treatments that affirm their religious beliefs about sexuality or gender. She previously told lawmakers that she is concerned most counseling is now LGBTQ-affirming and therefore would not be helpful for someone with anti-LGBTQ beliefs. “To prohibit counseling that aligns with traditional or biblical viewpoints is religious discrimination,” she said.

There have been points in history when it was the U.S. that graciously welcomed talented individuals displaced by intolerant, anti-intellectual, or dangerous regimes, and reaped the social, technological and economic rewards. I do not think it hyperbolic to say that this flow is now in the throes of reversal. An investment on this front made by Canada today will be a signal heard around the world and pay off richly in the years and decades to come.

When a person dies, clinicians often look at the cause of death to determine whether it could have been avoided, either by medical prevention such as vaccines or by treatments like antibiotics. These types of deaths are known as avoidable mortalities, and in most high-income countries around the world, the number is going down.

I had just turned thirty and was doing what one does after a big birthday: lamenting my failures. My life felt like a solid C+ and to make it worse I started obsessively stalking old friends’ Facebook pages, finding nothing but achievements and milestones. I’d been hoping for failures and tribulations, for any excuse I could find to grade my life on a curve.

Claire Goodman is a Professor of Health and Care Research at the University of Hertfordshire who, for the last 20 years, has been leading research that looks at older people, mainly living either in their own homes or in care homes, and living and dying in either of those places.

Dipak Sargar in action at the Khelo India Para Games 2025 in New Delhi.

“You are killing my mum to bomb someone’s son”

Systematic reviews of interventions to prevent or reduce violence against women and girls find that sufficient investment into the right programs can address the core drivers of violence and lead to a significant reduction and prevention of violence. The reviews identify that most successful interventions do not typically separate out prevention from early intervention and response. They focus on gender dynamics, power and control, and locally relevant social structures that disempower women and girls.

Social work in hospitals plays a particularly important role in creating a harmonious relationship between the spirit and body of the patient, between the patient and medical staff and between the patient and the community. This is also a necessary factor to increase the satisfaction of the patient and the patient’s family when coming to the hospital for treatment.

A fake website meant to look like a CDC webpage was put up sometime this month and quickly taken offline, but not before diligent information manipulation researchers noticed several signs that it was likely connected to Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The site falsely suggested a link between vaccines and autism, using “testimonial” videos made by CHD and long-debunked scientific disinformation. While the site has been taken down, the question remains: what, exactly, was the plan here?

The administration’s research funding and DEI cuts present an existential threat to regional public universities like Southern Illinois University, the economic backbone of the conservative rural region it serves. Above: Students walk across the campus of SIU in Carbondale.

These statistics can be found in the latest Administration for Children’s Services prescribing reports, offering rare insight into a long-running national public health concern: the frequent and sometimes haphazard prescribing of psychotropic drugs to foster youth. Federal authorities have warned about the health dangers for more than a dozen years.

Musa al-Gharbi writes that the tumult at Columbia University and other elite schools about Middle East policy is of little consequence to the people struggling in the Middle East. However, what Columbia does is of immense consequence to the overall landscape of higher education in the United States because of a phenomenon sociologists describe as “institutional isomorphism”.

NIH study finds number of steps taken daily may be more important for cancer risk than the intensity of activity.

Despite government claims there will be no return to austerity, sick and disabled people face a real-terms cut to their incomes and the criteria for claiming personal independence payment (Pip) will become stricter than ever. This isn’t just a policy to save £5 billion, it’s cruelty and a devastating attack on disabled people.

Western Australia’s child protection authorities are disproportionately removing children from Aboriginal families and placing them in out-of-home care, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Children continue to be removed from their homes nearly two decades after the Australian government issued an apology to First Nations peoples for forcibly removing their children.

In the event, where social work practices in Romania and the effects of the EU process were discussed, transformations in the child protection system and social service models were examined in detail.

Delusions, hallucinations and disordered thinking are collectively known as psychosis. These “positive” symptoms are among the most widely recognized aspects of schizophrenia. For about two thirds of patients with schizophrenia—which affects approximately 23 million people around the world—traditional antipsychotic drugs are often highly effective at treating psychosis. But these drugs frequently come with problematic side effects. And they do little to help with the so-called negative symptoms of schizophrenia, such as emotional flatness and social withdrawal, or with other issues involving thinking and memory referred to as cognitive problems.

There’s reason to believe that Bisignano is being brought in to finish DOGE’s job, based on his past experience as the CEO of the oligopolist data processing firm Fiserv, the nation’s largest provider of back-office banking services. Crippling Social Security’s ability to serve customers is seen by many as a stalking horse for privatizing parts, if not all, of the system, and companies like Fiserv are waiting in the wings. “Wall Street wants part of the $1.6 trillion that flows through the agency,” said Nancy Altman, a member of Social Security’s advisory board and president of the advocacy group Social Security Works. “There’s money to be made.”

Under the proposed law, mentally competent, terminally ill adults in England and Wales with six months or less to live would be given the right to end their lives with medical help. Polls show that a majority of Britons back assisted dying and supporters say the law needs to catch up with public opinion.

Silas Xuereb: I characterize this process over the past forty to fifty years as neoliberalism. And this essentially means policy shifts that are motivated by the idea that free markets are the best way to organize everything — the provision of all sorts of goods, from natural resources to housing, health care, and transportation. In Canada, this shift has manifested itself specifically in terms of free-trade agreements that have prioritized protecting investors over supporting workers.

About one-quarter of Mipim attendees are from the UK, with every British banner and brochure focused on one thing: courting investors with the promise of growth. A billboard declares Manchester “The UK’s Growth Opportunity”. Another proclaims that in the Tees Valley, “Anything is Possible”. Newcastle’s CEO and director of investment and growth tell me how the city makes development “dead easy for investment”. But the question is: growth for whom?

Julie Jones, Senior Social Worker at Nightingale House Hospice, explained: “Our intention for the group is to allow carers a much-needed break whilst their loved ones are safely attending our wellbeing sessions here at the hospice.

Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Secretary Rex Gatchalian commends the dedication and selfless acts of social workers to help families affected by disasters during the hybrid celebration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Social Work Day at Novotel Araneta City in Cubao, Quezon City

The Department of Health and Human Services has abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states that were being used for tracking infectious diseases, mental health services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues. The cuts are likely to further hamstring state health departments, which are already underfunded and struggling with competing demands from chronic diseases, resurgent infections like syphilis and emerging threats like bird flu. Above: An MMR vaccination clinic in Lubbock, Texas, last month amid a measles outbreak.

Scientists developed a compound that appeared to relieve pain in mice without adverse side effects. The finding could lead to more effective alternatives to opioids for chronic pain treatment.