News (1,512 posts)

A charter of rights for people affected by substance use has been launched by the Scottish Government, designed to ‘improve the experience of anyone needing support’.

The initiative, led by departments including the Social Work Department of the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee and the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, marks the first provincial-level, multi-departmental effort on the Chinese mainland to address outdoor secondhand smoke exposure and minimize passive smoking.

Over the years at CFAB, we’ve heard many stories from social workers about how a lack of awareness of diverse cultures and religions has obstructed their engagement with families.

With NIH support, scientists across the United States and around the world conduct wide-ranging research to discover ways to meet the NIH mission to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.

Despite the virulent pushback anti-DEI bills have received, it’s unlikely the momentum will slow in the new year, when Republicans will control both legislatures and governor’s offices in 23 states. Several red-state lawmakers have already signaled they plan to file similar bills in 2025—and some conservative groups and pundits have hinted that they intend to focus again on restricting classroom learning.

Every dollar invested in the current PNEP or its expansion is estimated to save $2 in hepatitis C and injection-related infection treatment costs. This return on investment strongly supports ongoing maintenance and scale-up of the PNEP in Canada from an economic perspective.

Dame Moira Gibb touches on the Social Work Task Force, the launch and demise of the College of Social Work, and why social work should open its doors to the media

Minister of Social Affairs Saifullah Yusuf has urged Indonesian social workers to adopt combined approaches to address complex challenges in the field.

The rapidly increasing aging population will lead to a shortage of care providers in the future. While robotic technologies are a potential alternative, their widespread use is limited by poor acceptance. In a new study, researchers have examined a user-centric approach to understand the factors influencing user willingness among caregivers and recipients in Japan, Ireland, and Finland. Users’ perspectives can aid the development of home-care robots with better acceptance.

Assemblywoman Jessica González-Rojas introduced legislation last year that would eliminate the social work licensing exam requirement.

A new psychological study has shown that when people know they are under surveillance it generates an automatic response of heightened awareness of being watched, with implications for public mental health.

Frances Perkins was a trailblazing woman and pioneering advocate for social justice, economic security, and labor rights. Perkins was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet as Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, becoming one of President Roosevelt’s closest and most highly regarded advisors. She fought for working people and served as a driving force behind the New Deal, helping to lift Americans out of the Great Depression. Above: The brick house at the Frances Perkins Homestead in Newcastle, Maine.

Louisa, a town of about 2,600 on the border of West Virginia, suffered with the contraction of the coal industry, but ARC, in addition to its treatment centers, has opened a cafe, a bakery, a small gallery, an old theater that the company renovated and other businesses where clients in its recovery programs work.

In animal studies, boosting serotonin in the cells that line the gut reduced anxious and depressive-like behaviors without causing cognitive or gastrointestinal side effects.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said: 
– In recent years, too many children have been failed by their last line of defence: the state.
– This bill will be a seminal moment for child protection. No more words, no more lessons learnt. This government will put children first at every turn.
– That means a child-centred government, with better protections for young people and real join up between children’s social care, schools and local services. Alongside further measures to drive high and rising standards in our schools, this bill will deliver on this government’s Plan for Change, so that all children, whatever their circumstances, can achieve and thrive.

A new study shows that long-term exposure to air pollution contributes to millions of deaths in India. The research emphasizes the need for stricter air quality regulations in the country.

The man who murdered Thompson, for whatever reason, deserves to be punished. But if we’re going to be honest about the public’s utter lack of sympathy, we have to acknowledge that it springs from the legalized murder practiced by all the Brian Thompsons who run the American medical insurance industry. The last thirty-six hours have seen an outpouring of statistics, personal testimony, and news stories that I find perhaps even more coldly upsetting than the footage of the murder. The statistics include UnitedHealthcare having the highest denial rate — 32 percent in 2023 — of any U.S. insurance company.

The parts of the Biden agenda most targeted at addressing women’s economic vulnerabilities were never passed.

A new study highlights a hidden challenge of using AI in medical imaging research — the phenomenon of highly accurate yet potentially misleading results known as ‘shortcut learning.’ The researchers analyzed thousands of knee X-rays and found that AI models can ‘predict’ unrelated and implausible traits such as whether patients abstained from eating refried beans or beer. While these predictions have no medical basis, the models achieved high levels of accuracy by exploiting subtle and unintended patterns in the data.

More than 300,000 people die from drowning every year – and nearly all of these cases are preventable, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO)…. Children are the highest-risk group, the report found. Nearly a quarter of all drowning deaths happen among children under age 4. Another 19% of drowning deaths are among kids between ages 5 and 14. Above: A father teaches his child to swim in a pond in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

A report published by Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security research in late November concluded that single-person households will account for 44.3% of the nationwide total by 2050. The figure rises to 54.1% in Tokyo. The number of people aged 65 or older living alone is projected to rise to 10.83 million by 2050, a 1.5-fold increase from the 2020 figure.

The Crucial Communism Teaching Act, in its own words, is designed to teach children that “certain political ideologies, including communism and totalitarianism…conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy that are essential to the founding of the United States.”
Although sponsored by Republicans, it enjoys widespread support from Democrats and is focused on China, Venezuela, Cuba and other targets of U.S. empire. The wording of the bill has many worried that this will be a centerpiece of a new era of anti-communist hysteria, similar to previous McCarthyist periods.

The library will be the only department to lose all of its faculty members. Administrators say the university can make do with the library dean and remaining staff. Above: Librarian Hunter Dunlap stands at the Malpass Library on the campus of Western Illinois University

Exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood altered the balance of mental health in the U.S. population, making generations of Americans more depressed, anxious and inattentive or hyperactive, according to researchers. They estimate that 151 million cases of psychiatric disorder over the past 75 years have resulted from American children’s exposure to lead.

“My friends, you don’t have to be a PhD in political science to understand that this is not democracy. This is not one person, one vote. This is not all of us coming together to decide our future. This is oligarchy.”

“School counselors and general education social workers are definitely areas where we are lacking,” said Karen Paquette, Assistant Superintendent of Lewiston Public Schools, which received the most funding of the districts.

The portal is a resource from NIH in support of the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, which is focused on closing research gaps and improving prevention, detection and treatment of health issues affecting girls and women.

Staff in social work teams across Lancashire – including at White Cross in Lancaster – are to walk out for 25 days, including during the festive period, as part of the sixth round of strikes over salary grades and work boundaries.

Officials from Qatar Social Work Foundation at the Global Forum against Racism and Discrimination, in Barcelona, Spain.

There’s plenty of data to back up the anger over private health plans expressed online since the shooting. Insurance costs are far outpacing inflation, leaving patients with soaring out-of-pocket costs. Health insurance companies are notorious for exploiting prior authorization schemes to avoid paying for care and have denied claims at alarming rates in recent years. However, corporate consolidation of industry “middlemen” that experts say are partially to blame for the prescription drug affordability crisis has received less scrutiny from the general public, despite efforts by lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to shine light on the notoriously opaque and confusing corporate bureaucracy that determines the cost of medicine.

> Conservative-leaning “parent rights” groups are succeeding in their children’s book ban campaigns as sales drop.
> Librarians say they are afraid to put books considered controversial on the shelves.
> Most of the banned children’s books deal with race or LGBTQ+ themes.

One open-access publisher, MDPI, based in Switzerland and founded in 1996, has published one million articles since its establishment, including 295,186 peer-reviewed articles in 2022 in its 403 journals. As an open-access publisher, MDPI charges a transaction fee of approximately US$2,000 per article. MDPI reports that it relies on 600,000 reviewers and has a rejection rate of 57%. These numbers are impossible to verify.

Analysis of student essays using generative AI detection systems to identify GenAI users showed that students who use GenAI score significantly lower in exams – on average 6.7 out of 100 points lower – with the negative effect particularly large for students with high learning potential, according to researchers in Germany and Canada.

Jackie Chen appeared at Hong Kong’s District Count… for her rioting retrial.

… the industry is rife with health and safety violations. Not only are American consumers – mostly women, eager for low-cost manicures and pedicures – increasingly at risk for bacterial and fungal infections, but the salon workers themselves – many of them undocumented, and over 80% women – face workplace exploitation in addition to threats of toxic contamination. The industry is in desperate need of regulatory reform, union organizing and stronger labor enforcement.

On Dec. 9, WW first reported that CareOregon, the state’s largest Medicaid provider, would stop reimbursing next year for services provided by associate therapists and social workers who practice independently of an in-network clinic. The announcement sent shock waves among mental health professionals, some of whom said the policy change would worsen Oregon’s mental health care access crisis.

My short request to you or anyone you care about is as follows: If you are thinking about enrolling in the University of Arizona Global Campus — don’t! I’m speaking with you as a professor at the UA who has seen this disaster unfold, and I cannot be quiet any longer. I care too deeply about students who are potentially wasting thousands of dollars on an education that does not live up to its promise.

“There are many questions including how cannabis can impact someone’s mental health positively or negatively. And social workers want to be prepared,” says Joan Pittman, PhD, MSW, LCSW-C, clinical professor and director of the MSW Program at the Universities at Shady Grove.

But it’s not AI that has a lot of professors worried. It’s what lies behind that willingness to cheat. While the reasons vary by student and situation, certain explanations surface frequently. Students are working long hours while taking full course loads. They doubt their ability to perform well. They arrive at college with weak reading and study skills. They don’t value the assignments they’re given. They feel like the only way they can succeed is to be perfect. They believe they will not be punished — or not punished harshly — if caught. And many, it seems, don’t feel particularly guilty about it.

The report, prepared by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, exposes a litany of complaints from social workers who say they are struggling with excessive caseloads, chronic understaffing, low wages and insufficient training.

The Swedish Board of Health and Welfare reports that in 2022 10.5% of boys and 6% of girls received an ADHD diagnosis, which is 50% more than in 2019. And the board forecast that the rates will eventually plateau at 15% for boys and 11% for girls.

The government says the harsher sentencing rules are in response to “community outrage over crimes being perpetrated by young offenders” and will act as a deterrent. But many experts have pointed to research showing that tougher penalties do not reduce youth offending, and can in fact exacerbate it. The United Nations has also criticised the reforms, arguing they disregard conventions on the human rights of children and violate international law.

A Glasgow learning disability worker has been hit with a warning after getting into a physical and verbal fight with a colleague outside a client’s home.

How did the granddaughter of incarcerated Japanese Americans wind up on ICE’s payroll? Above: Japanese internment camp in Manzanar, California

Limiting red meat consumption is key to a sustainable and healthy diet, yet Americans are among the world’s largest consumers of red meat. A new study reveals the demographics of American adults who choose not to eat red meat and finds that environmental concerns may matter more to them than health risks.

A bill under consideration by the Montgomery County Council would provide discounted public parking permits for child care center workers and social workers in homelessness services who are affected by Purple Line construction in downtown Silver Spring.

The term “fidelity” comes from the sciences and refers to the precise execution of a protocol in an experiment to ensure results are reliable. However, a classroom is not a lab, and students are not experiments. As a result, teachers and teacher educators have long decried fidelity and the impact it has on them and their students.

At a Powys County Council meeting on 5 December, social services chiefs explained that they need more money to deal with the increasing demand for care packages for adults and the higher costs of placements for children in care.