News (1,298 posts)

Aberlour Children’s Charity joined with Govan Law Centre, urging politicians to make transformational changes to the way public debt is collected in Scotland to help end child poverty.

NHS Digital figures show 30,030 under-18s were in contact with mental health services at the NHS Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board. This was up from 20,170 in June 2019, the latest comparable period before the pandemic, and means the number of children receiving mental health support in the area has risen by nearly half in the last five years.

University of Southern Indiana social work faculty are thrilled to celebrate the remarkable milestones of the USI Social Work Program—50 years of social work at USI, 40 years of the Bachelor of Social Work degree and 30 years of Master of Social Work (MSW) degree.

Fordham University has filed an objection to 2U’s bankruptcy restructuring, claiming the online program manager was “negligent” and cannot carry out its contract…. “2U’s repeated breaches and its inability to cure them, much less give adequate assurance of future performance, renders 2U unable to assume the agreement with Fordham,” the filing states.

UNISON has written to the charity to say that if its workers back industrial action there could be mass walkouts by Enable Scotland’s social care staff later in the autumn. The union says this is the first strike ballot for over a decade in Scotland’s charitable social care sector and shows the deep dissatisfaction that exists over pay.

All but the poorest pensioners will no longer receive the winter fuel allowance after MPs voted to make cuts to the payments. After a Conservative motion to prevent the change was defeated by 348 votes to 228, only those in receipt of benefits such as pension credit, universal credit or income support will receive the £200-300 payment to help with their heating bills.

It’s time finally to jettison the convenient claim that taxing the rich more would only reduce tax revenue. Above: The consumption patterns of the 1 per cent contribute disproportionately to greenhouse-gas emissions

Social Development Minister Sisisi Tolashe, has called for urgent employment of 55,000 social services professionals to tackle the ongoing problem of gender-based violence, poverty, and crime due to rising social services demands in the country.

In Ecuador, urban farms have long been a way to create sustainable access to food. But they’re also helping women flourish as gardeners and entrepreneurs. Above: Maria Achiña and Alegria Irua are part of a group of local women who till the land beside the neighborhood’s health clinic.

For college freshmen, the first 6 weeks of the school year are typically a vulnerable time for underage drinking due to social pressures, increased freedom, and other factors. Underage and binge drinking are both serious public health problems and are common on many college campuses and in the surrounding neighborhoods. Binge-drinking rates are higher among college students than their noncollege peers.

During the pandemic, myths and misconceptions about sex flourished, said Jessica Wood, who conducts research about those aged 18 to 24 for the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada. Youth turned to each other for information, Wood said, when classes stopped, sexual and reproductive health clinics closed (new window) and school nurses or social workers weren’t available.

Young says that’s an aim of the rules. “You can expect to see higher payment rates that may make it more attractive for providers to come in-network,” Young says, meaning therapists should be getting paid more for insurance-covered visits. “You can also expect to see insurers investing in networks for providers other than physicians,” Young says. That means insurance might cover more mental health providers than they did before, such as non-MD therapists, social workers, or telehealth services.

The US and Canada are in the middle of an opioid epidemic. But opioid use is a growing problem in other countries too. Opioid-related deaths make up the largest proportion of drug-related fatalities across the UK, with an average of 40 a week. From patients who have become dependent on prescription painkillers to people addicted to newer, more potent synthetic opioids called nitazenes, new treatments for opioid abuse are desperately needed.

According to two psychologists, the field of psychological science has a problem with the concept of self-control. It has named self-control both a “trait” — a key facet of personality involving attributes like conscientiousness, grit and the ability to tolerate delayed gratification — and a “state,” a fleeting condition that can best be described as willpower. These two concepts are at odds with one another and are often confused, the authors report.

Why is there so much job instability? For the most prosperous corporations, it’s not due to a lack of profits, technology, or foreign competition. Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft laid off more than 40,000 workers in 2022-23 despite booking hundreds of billions of dollars in profits. These high-tech behemoths kill jobs because of what “the economy” means to their CEOs and to their major Wall Street investors. Their economy values higher stock prices, which translates into enormous incomes for investors and the company executives who are mostly paid through stock incentives.

When it was time to say goodbye, a group gathered with Pagonis and Rosie for support, including Augusta O’Reilly the college’s veterinary social worker.

Teachers described frequently breaking up hallway fights, handling classroom disruptions, and struggling from a lack of additional staffing support including paraprofessionals, social workers, and security guards.
“Last year, we saw more incidents of emotional distress, student dysregulation, and mental health crisis among students. But, we’ve been sounding the alarm for years,” Chapin said.

Dr. Helen Whincup, Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Stirling, who led the study, said, “Despite the numbers of children and families involved, there have been gaps in what is known about children’s pathways through the care system, their route and time to living in permanent families, and what influences outcomes and well-being. Since 2014, the research team have been addressing these gaps by gathering and analyzing data.”

Recruiting new social workers at a council criticised over the death of a six-year-old remains the biggest challenge to improving its children’s services, its director says. Widespread failings were identified at Solihull Council after the killing of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes in June 2020 at the hands of his father and his partner.

The damning final report from the Grenfell inquiry lays bare the failings that led to the deadly fire. It has been rightly praised for highlighting the “systematic dishonesty” of companies, decades of government failure and the tenant management organisation’s culture of hostility towards residents. Although broadly well received, there is a glaring omission in the report. It is yet another example of failure to address race and class in the discussion of housing.

A rainstorm passes over Interstate 94 in Morton County, North Dakota… Inclement weather and long travel distances to medical providers present serious access barriers for seniors here, many of whom are not able to drive or are uncomfortable driving in low-visibility conditions.

Striking taxicab drivers wave strike notices in New York, on January 3, 1939.

As Americans all across the country report feeling increasingly pressed by inflated food prices, an explosive new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveals that about 18 million families — or 13.5% of U.S. households — struggled to access enough food, marking the highest levels of food insecurity in nearly a decade.

GMB Scotland organiser Keir Greenaway said changes were not forthcoming from the Scottish government

The NWAG is a group of sector leaders, established by the last government, to “consider drivers of unnecessary workload and to develop solutions so that social workers have enough time to spend working directly with children and families”. The initiative came out of the Conservatives’ Stable Homes, Built on Love children’s social care reform agenda and was based on a recommendation from the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (the “care review”).

Veteran social worker Eddie Tse (above) said he had been a member of the Social Workers Registration Board’s disciplinary committee since 2020, but found his name was absent from the updated list.

Over the past two years, a record number of Venezuelans have come to the U.S. seeking a better life. Instead, they’ve found themselves in communities roiling over how much to help the newcomers — or whether to help at all. Unable to legally work without filing expensive and complicated paperwork, some have found themselves sleeping on the streets — even those who are pregnant.

“We know from the research that people who were closest in physical proximity to the event itself were most affected by it,” says Dr. Mark Macgowan, an Associate Dean and Professor of Social Work in the Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work. His research, teaching, and clinical work focuses on survivors and responders to mass casualty events.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee’s main revenue comes from two casinos: Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Valley River Casino. The casinos bring in the majority of the tribe’s revenue and employ over 4,000 people in Western North Carolina. In recent years, the tribe has focused on diversifying its income – especially after having to briefly close the casinos during the 2020 pandemic.

I was brought on by Vermont Public and VTDigger last year to report on Vermont’s housing crisis. I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to researchers, politicians, government officials and housing advocates to understand the situation here. And I’ve spent a lot of time with people who don’t have a permanent home right now.

Have we reached an acceptable level of poverty where programmes such as hot meals in schools tinker around the edges of the crisis but still leave families disempowered and struggling? This was among questions raised during End Child Poverty Week — questions given heightened urgency by new ESRI findings showing 250,000 young children and their parents live below the poverty line.

Colchester-based charity Headway Essex provides advice and practical assistance to adults with an acquired brain injury (ABI), as well as their families and carers.

RC bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after 21 phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, no one could find him a therapist.

Students increasingly treat college as a transaction. Who — or what — is to blame?

“For about 10 years, I’ve been in social work in a mental health capacity, in some sense. So, it felt natural when I did transition over to being with the police department,” Shannon said. “When people don’t know what to do, or they’re at a loss, or don’t know where to turn, they call law enforcement for help and to figure it out. Really, I’m just a problem solver.”

wWile many on the Left — myself included — miss the exciting vision of his 2020 campaign, Sanders’s new program has a compelling logic to it. If Trump is beaten, Harris will be president, and the Left and labor will need a set of winnable demands to organize around.

The findings add to evidence that choosing treatments based on the neurological underpinnings of a patient’s depression — which vary among people — increases the odds of success.

Viktor Orbán, started a political campaign with an attack on Central European University in Budapest, with demagogic rhetoric directed against its supposed spreading of “gender ideology”…. The situation is structurally the same in the United States – would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent.

The Lampard Inquiry will examine the deaths of people who had received inpatient care for mental health in Essex between 2000 and 2023.

Herman Hui Chung-shing, chairman of the Social Workers Registration Board, which oversees 27,000 professionals in the sector, said on Saturday that the code of conduct would include the provisions to bolster the mechanism for dealing with anyone involved in national security and other serious criminal cases…. Asked whether social workers convicted in a subversion trial over an unofficial Legislative Council election primary in 2020 would be struck off, Hui said they would be “disqualified from continuing to practise” but the details of each case would be handled individually.

Amanda Kerstetter, REACH Harm Reduction Specialist for South King County, holds a box of narcan in 2023. Narcan can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 booth at the National Conservative Conference in Washington D.C., July 8, 2024.

Sixty years ago, Life photographer John Dominis traveled to eastern Kentucky, where he captured shocking and raw photographs of deprivation—the target of President Lyndon Johnson’s recently announced “unconditional war on poverty.” Published in a feature photo-essay, the images humanized those who stood to gain the most from new federal aid programs.

Lilla, 14, and her service dog, Lopez, outside their family’s home in Michigan. This year’s middle school winner of the NPR Student Podcast Challenge tells how her golden retriever, Lopez, helped restore her independence.

There is a growing sense that the future of work might not unfold in our favour. People are expected to work longer, for less, with less security and fewer protections. Rather than making work easier or more rewarding, we expect the development and application of new technologies, particularly in the areas of automation, computation and artificial intelligence, to disempower us.

Several religious orders have been given “legal advice” to stop participating in reviews by the Irish Catholic Church’s child abuse watchdog, over concerns about “data protection”.

We often joke about awkwardness; it’s a staple of contemporary comedy. The exclamation ‘Awkward!’ functions as a light-hearted deflection, defusing social tension. The reality is heavier. Awkwardness can be funny, but it can also be serious – it inhibits our ability to act even when we know we should, and it can shut down or pre-empt conversations about important topics like menstruation, money, menopause, mortality. The desire to avoid awkwardness acts as a powerful social inhibition, preventing people from speaking up, and motivating compliance with problematic social and moral norms. So, which is it, then?

Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” While the quote’s original context is complicated, its message is timeless.

President Joe Biden on Friday appointed Janie Hipp (Chickasaw) to be a member of the Community Development Advisory Board within the U.S. Department of Treasury…. Hipp holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in social work from the University of Oklahoma, a J.D. from Oklahoma City University’s School of Law and a LLM in agricultural law from the University of Arkansas School of Law.