News (1,270 posts)

The percentage of smokers in each of the UK countries in 2023 was 13.5 per cent in Scotland, 13.3 per cent in Northern Ireland, 12.6 per cent in Wales and 11.6 per cent in England.

Important work is progressing to address Dumfries and Galloway’s children’s care crisis, with the ultimate aim of eventually ending the practice of children and young people in care being sent to unfamiliar locations elsewhere in Scotland – at astronomical costs.

Plans to create a supported living scheme for people aged 16 and over in a Wrexham village could be approved despite anti-social behaviour concerns.

“We were stunned (by the decision),” said Armenta, a retired emeritus social work professor. “We had been in communication with the communications director of the Texas Historical Commission since July. As time went by, we decided to go ahead and file the open records (request) because we were just anxious to figure out what the next steps might be. (Then) boom … we found out.”

Legislative attempts to limit academic freedom and censure campus speech are continuing, but they are becoming more subtle and disguised, according to a new report from PEN America…. Along with the report, PEN America also released an up-to-date Index of Educational Gag Orders, featuring all the restrictions introduced and passed in state legislatures over the past four years.

Members of the Quality Hill Tenant Union launched a rent strike on Oct. 1.

Opening the ceremony at the Tullyglass House Hotel, Ballymena, Patricia Higgins, chief executive, Northern Ireland Social Care Council, said: “I’ve been very proud today to celebrate the hard work, dedication and achievement of our social workers.

The introduction of Progress comes after Frontline’s Pathways programme was scrapped in April after DfE stopped funding the scheme, which launched in 2022, two years earlier than expected. Frontline’s chief executive Mary Jackson announced the end of the leadership scheme at a meeting of the Education Select Committee.

The headquarters of the central Post Office in Naples, located in Piazza Matteotti, has been occupied by social workers from Gesco who displayed a banner reading “Welfare is not a luxury.”

The City of Airdrie has released its 2024 Houselessness Estimation Study…. The top three reasons cited for housing insecurity were high housing costs (rent/mortgage exceeding income), health challenges (including illness, mental health concerns, and physical disabilities), and low vacancy rates, with an estimated one per cent of rental units available in Airdrie.

Unicef and the Malaysian Association of Social Workers (MASW) called for the urgent passage of the long-awaited Social Work Profession Bill to address the critical shortage of trained social workers in Malaysia, particularly for the country’s most vulnerable communities.

As a hurricane intensified by hot ocean water now threatens to destroy the Tampa Bay region, Florida Republicans bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry are pushing legislation that would bar the president from declaring a climate emergency. Reps. Greg Steube and Byron Donalds, both Republicans who have together received more than $175,000 from oil and gas interests over their relatively short careers, cosponsored the House version of the bill last year, which frames the climate crisis as a “false emergency.”

“Our youth, particularly underrepresented youth, are not getting high quality services, and when we don’t reach them, they’re at risk for their disorders or conditions to worsen over time,” says Dr. Jennifer Manuel, the School’s Associate Dean for Research and an Associate Professor. “Substance use is highly correlated with ongoing mental health issues and being involved in the justice system. There are a host of reasons why we want to address this head on.”

Working people understand that the periodic ups and downs of the economy can legitimately lead to job loss. But they also know that in many cases the reason they lost their job was not mismatches in supply and demand. Rather, their jobs were sacrificed to satisfy out and out corporate greed.

A cash-strapped English council is considering charging parents of children taken into local authority care half of the weekly cost of looking after them.
Derbyshire county council said “unprecedented financial challenges” meant it had little option but to “maximise alternative sources of income” to try to reduce the strain on its children’s services. The weekly charge would range from £90 to £113 depending on the child’s age.

Berkessel and her team found that, overall, participants with obesity reported more relationship, economic, and health disadvantages compared with participants without obesity. But they also found that those living in low-obesity regions were significantly more likely to be unemployed — and to report suboptimal health compared to their counterparts in high-obesity areas.

Rehearsing alternative outcomes of discarding through imagery rescripting shows promise as a treatment strategy for people who hoard, a study by UNSW psychology researchers has shown.

Michigan has made meaningful progress in supporting social workers over the past year — progress we can build on to further strengthen the profession and tackle the mental health care provider shortage.

According to the researchers, based on the study’s findings, commercially insured patients more often received treatments like physical and occupational therapy, noninvasive neurostimulation, and chiropractic care for chronic pain, whereas Medicaid-insured patients more often received medications. This suggests that type of health insurance is linked to differential access to the full range of evidence-based treatment options for chronic pain.

“Daddy, tell me about the days when you were able to save Germany just in time,” a young girl asks her father as the two sit on the veranda of their idyllic home in an AI generated video by the youth wing of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. “It all started with the great remigration,” replies the father, birds chirping as they gaze out over their flowery garden. And then the dance beat kicks in. This is the beginning of the video for Remigration Hit, a far-right dance track which imagines the deportation of migrants from Germany en masse. The widely shared video for the song portrays mostly blond-haired, blue-eyed pilots and flight attendants — embodying, it seems, delusive Nazi conceptions of “Aryan” racial purity — dancing in celebration as they deport people of color in planes decorated in the blue and red of the AfD.

‘When you have a short supply of those professionals to start with, what happens is a domino effect,’ says Kathy Jones, the President of the Prince Edward Island Association of Social Workers.

The original proposal for a National Care Service was inspired by the NHS; a network of care boards across Scotland, all part of a new agency which could ensure high standards. Ministers said it would end the “postcode lottery” in care provision and “ensure consistently high-quality care”. Those are undoubtedly laudable aims, which few have argued against. But the detail has always been an issue.

Labour wants action. But rent caps, rising interest rates and restrictions on councils have hit the affordable homes sector hard. Above: Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, has set a goal of 1.5m homes built over the course of this Parliament.

Self-reported numbers showed that in 2022, USC admitted the highest percentage of students with legacy and donor ties of any California university, 14.4 percent. It was followed by Stanford and Santa Clara, where those numbers were 13.8 percent and 13.1 percent respectively.

Both major parties—and often the mainstream press—ignore that when it comes to fentanyl, Covid, HIV, mpox, or most social contagions, the community spread inside the United States (or inside people’s homes) is due to America being America, not due to outside agitators.

The Foodbank of Southern California — a grocery-and-meal distribution hub serving hundreds of food pantries in Long Beach and South Los Angeles — has closed its doors amid a state investigation into a possible multimillion-dollar fraud and embezzlement scheme, according to state officials and a nonprofit executive. The closure is expected to severely affect thousands of low-income families, seniors and homeless people who rely on food distribution sites for their nutritional needs.

Militaries want films like Top Gun because they make the armed forces seem glamorous, exciting, social and sexy. So they often give filmmakers cheap or free access to billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded jet fighters, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. In return, the movies serve as sophisticated, enticing forms of recruitment propaganda.

To truly change history, it is not enough for the masses to rise up; they must subsequently win concessions such as ceasefires, fair elections, environmental protections, or new policies that promote racial justice. While protests continue erupting with remarkable frequency, they are also failing, at historic rates, to achieve protesters’ stated goals. As Time hailed the power of the protester, the rate at which mass protests succeeded in meeting their objectives was plummeting, from two in three during the early 2000s to just one in six by the early 2020s.

Putting all these stories together, we are left with a picture of a professional regulator that can’t progress its own investigations properly, has subjected a social worker to harassment, needs to train itself on freedom of speech, and is now no longer going to properly review the CPD logs of its registrants.

Malaysia’s most vulnerable communities, including the thousands of children facing abuse and neglect, are at risk due to a critical shortage of qualified, trained social workers. The Social Work Profession Bill has yet to be tabled and social workers continue to await the recognition, resources and support they need to protect those in crisis.

The other day I was stopped on the street by someone who told me that during a particularly bad depressive episode in which she was hospitalised, she just thought of me and realised her life wasn’t actually that bad. Um, thanks? I’m not sure if that comment was more or less offensive than the guy who told me he “wasn’t sure how I got out of bed each day”. Cheers bro.

For almost a decade, researchers have been gathering evidence that the social media platform Facebook disproportionately amplifies low-quality content and misinformation. So it was something of a surprise when in 2023 the journal Science published a study that found Facebook’s algorithms were not major drivers of misinformation during the 2020 United States election. This study was funded by Facebook’s parent company, Meta.

In May, I completed a 120-hour practicum with the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) as part of the requirements for the Queen’s Concurrent Education program. The same month, on May 16, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) celebrated a landmark achievement: the successful lobbying for paid placements for social work students in Australia.

BASW member David Jones on the importance of helping scriptwriters get it right

Catholic cultural warriors often don’t remember the Catholic Church’s history in promoting vital social justice programs like Social Security. Worse still, there are those Catholics who want to rewrite that history altogether. Together these culture warriors, along with the authors of Project 2025, are not only undermining the work of the Catholic Church but Catholicism itself.

Elm City COMPASS announced expansions to its crisis response service…. It emerged as a response to the murder of George Floyd, in the wake of demands to minimize the role of police in managing health and housing crises. COMPASS dispatch teams include an unarmed social worker and a peer with lived experience, who respond to crises together.

Like the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and other conservative billionaires, Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) program provides important flood insurance relief, researchers say. But due to its design, it’s used more in communities with greater means to protect themselves, while lower-resourced areas benefit less.

The case of a Muhlenberg College faculty member whose anti-Israel comments have been at the center of campus controversy for months has reignited in recent days, prompting a new wave of discussion about whether professors’ extramural speech is protected by academic freedom.

Dr. Ian Rice, the program’s Director and an Associate Professor of Social Work was instrumental in developing the curriculum and ensuring that the inaugural cohort of 33 would be well-supported. Rice emphasizes the importance of the program in addressing the chronic shortage of social workers across the region.

Research at the University of Portsmouth has explored the relationship between high impulsivity and boredom, in an effort to find out what drives rash and sometimes unhealthy decisions.

German Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Hubertus Heil speaks during the “Jobturbo” round table in the Federal Chancellery.

The hype surrounding machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, can make it seem like it is only a matter of time before such techniques are used to solve all scientific problems. While impressive claims are often made, those claims do not always hold up under scrutiny. Machine learning may be useful for solving some problems but falls short for others.

Psilocybin, the psychedelic substance found in magic mushrooms, is a promising new treatment for psychiatric disorders, especially depression. The beneficial effects on mood and anxiety of psilocybin are rapid and pronounced after just a single treatment. A small study even suggested that these benefits remain after a year. But what is really needed is a comparison of the long-term effect of psilocybin with another treatment (an antidepressant) or a placebo.

A new regional model for victim services that rolled out this week is prompting major concerns from Albertans who’ve utilized the program, and for former social workers who worry that the proper level of care won’t be provided. Above: Alberta’s provincial flag

Compared with inactivity, a weekend warrior pattern of exercise (concentrating most moderate-to-vigorous physical activity in one to two days during the week) or a more evenly distributed physical activity pattern were associated with similarly lower risks of diseases across 16 categories — from heart and digestive conditions to mental health and neurological illnesses. The findings indicate that concentrated physical activity patterns may be just as effective for disease prevention as patterns where exercise is spread out throughout the week.

Other lawsuits filed against the city under the law allege abuse at juvenile jails, including Crossroads in Brownsville, Brooklyn; Horizon, the city’s juvenile jail in the Bronx (above); Spofford, a now-shuttered juvenile jail in the Bronx; and Rikers, where the city used to jail 16- and 17-year-olds before outlawing the practice. The accusations range from the 1960s to the 2020s.

Ms. Triantafyllia Athanasiou, President of Hellenic Association of Social Workers and Dr. Ghassan Khalil, UNICEF Representative in Greece, signed a Memorandum of Understanding on 30th September 2024, to strengthen Child Protection in Greece.