Using practice development methodology to develop children’s centre teams: Ideas for the future

The Children’s Centre Programme is a recent development in the UK and brings together multi-agency teams to work with disadvantaged families. Practice development methods enable teams to work together in new ways. Although the term practice development remains relatively poorly defined, its key properties suggest that it embraces engagement, empowerment, evaluation and evolution. This paper introduces the Children’s Centre Programme and practice development methods and aims to discuss the relevance of using this method to develop teams in children’s centres through considering the findings from an evaluation of a two-year project to develop inter-agency public health teams. The evaluation showed that practice development methods can enable successful team development and showed that through effective facilitation, teams can change their practice to focus on areas of local need. The team came up with their own process to develop a strategy for their locality

Miners shot down : a documentary on the Marikana massacre by Rehad Desai

A documentary on the Marikana massacre by Rehad Desai Followed by a discussion: Marikana – what it means for South Africa’s Future? Panelists for the discussion: Prof Peter Alexander, South Africa Research Chair in Social Change, University of Johannesburg Prof Mary Galvin, Department of Anthropology and Development, University of Johannesburg Mr Ronnie Kasril

Uneven progress in reducing exposure to violence at home for New Zealand adolescents 2001–2012: a nationally representative cross‐sectional survey series

Objective: To explore trends, and identify risk factors, that may explain changes in adolescent exposure to family violence over time.Methods: Data for this study was drawn from the Youth 2000 series of cross‐sectional surveys, carried out with New Zealand high school students in 2001, 2007 and 2012. Latent class analysis was used to understand different patterns of exposure to multiple risks for witnessing violence at home among adolescents.Results: Across all time periods, there was no change in witnessing emotional violence and a slight decline in witnessing physical violence at home. However, significant differences were noted between 2001 and 2007, and 2007 and 2012, in the proportion of adolescents who reported witnessing emotional and physical violence. Four latent classes were identified in the study sample; these were characterised by respondents' ethnicity, concerns about family relationships, food security and alcohol consumption. For two groups (characterised by food security, positive relationships and lower exposure to physical violence), there was a reduction in the proportion of respondents who witnessed physical violence but an increase in the proportion who witnessed emotional violence between 2001 and 2012. For the two groups characterised by poorer food security and higher exposure to physical violence, there were no changes in witnessing of physical violence in the home.Implications for public health: In addition to strategies directly aimed at violence, policies are needed to address key predictors of violence exposure such as social disparities, financial stress and alcohol use. These social determinants of health cannot be ignored

The New Deal: jeopardised by the geography of unemployment?

The New Deal is the Labour government's flagship programme to "end the tragic waste of youth and long-term unemployment" by getting people off welfare benefits and into work. This paper argues that the principal weakness of the New Deal is that it seeks to influence the character of labour supply (i.e. the motivation and skills of the unemployed) while neglecting the state of labour demand, which varies greatly between places. The uneven geography of unemployment in the UK is likely to have a crucial bearing on the programme's impact and effectiveness, but this has been largely ignored in its development. The paper outlines some of the practical consequences of this imbalance and suggests how it could be rectified for the programme to be more effective

The Dark Side of Transfer Pricing: Its Role in Tax Avoidance and Wealth Retentiveness

In conventional accounting literature, ?transfer pricing? is portrayed as a technique for optimal allocation of costs and revenues amongst divisions, subsidiaries and joint ventures within a group of related entities. Such representations of transfer pricing simultaneously acknowledge and occlude how it is deeply implicated in processes of wealth retentiveness that enable companies to avoid taxes and facilitate the flight of capital. A purely technical conception of transfer pricing calculations abstracts them from the politico-economic contexts of their development and use. The context is the modern corporation in an era of globalized trade and its relationship to state tax authorities, shareholders and other possible stakeholders. Transfer pricing practices are responsive to opportunities for determining values in ways that are consequential for enhancing private gains, and thereby contributing to relative social impoverishment, by avoiding the payment of public taxes. Evidence is provided by examining some of the transfer prices practices used by corporations to avoid taxes in developing and developed economies

Past and projected trends of body mass index and weight status in South Australia:2003 to 2019

OBJECTIVE: Functional data analysis (FDA) is a forecasting approach that, to date, has not been applied to obesity, and that may provide more accurate forecasting analysis to manage uncertainty in public health. This paper uses FDA to provide projections of Body Mass Index (BMI), overweight and obesity in an Australian population through to 2019.  METHODS: Data from the South Australian Monitoring and Surveillance System (January 2003 to December 2012, n=51,618 adults) were collected via telephone interview survey. FDA was conducted in four steps: 1) age-gender specific BMIs for each year were smoothed using a weighted regression; 2) the functional principal components decomposition was applied to estimate the basis functions; 3) an exponential smoothing state space model was used for forecasting the coefficient series; and 4) forecast coefficients were combined with the basis function.  RESULTS: The forecast models suggest that between 2012 and 2019 average BMI will increase from 27.2 kg/m(2) to 28.0 kg/m(2) in males and 26.4 kg/m(2) to 27.6 kg/m(2) in females. The prevalence of obesity is forecast to increase by 6-7 percentage points by 2019 (to 28.7% in males and 29.2% in females).  CONCLUSIONS: Projections identify age-gender groups at greatest risk of obesity over time. The novel approach will be useful to facilitate more accurate planning and policy development