I FELT GUILTY [THAT] I DIDN’T DO ENOUGH. ORGANIZATIONAL AND POLICY RESPONSES EXACERBATED FRONTLINE SOCIAL WORKER DISTRESS

This study explores urban social workers’ experiences working the front lines during COVID-19’s first wave. It aims to uncover social workers’ shifts in roles and responsibilities across the health and social service network, to illuminate how these shifts impacted them, and ultimately to derive meaning from these experiences to inform future directions for the profession. Eight social workers from a range of contexts were interviewed. Our analyses revealed that, while all participants described some negatives of front-line pandemic work, the frequency and intensity of these moments were exacerbated by organizational and policy responses. When social workers were expected to work outside of their scope of practice, when their skills were overlooked or underutilized, and when their organizational contexts focused on individual distress rather than collective support, they reported intensified periods of distress. If we hope to retain the health and wellbeing of our workforce and preserve the value of the profession, systemic preventative responses must take priority. Building opportunities for collective on-going peer support and debriefing, leveraging the expertise of social workers to address psychosocial issues, and including the voices of front-line workers in the development of solutions to pandemic-related hardships may help reduce social work distress and improve front-line workers’ responses to social issues.Alternate :Cette étude explore les expériences des travailleuses sociales et des travailleurs sociaux de première ligne en milieu urbain durant la première vague de COVID-19. Elle vise à mettre en lumière les changements de rôles et de responsabilités dans le réseau de la santé et des services sociaux, afin de montrer comment ces changements les ont affectés et prendre en compte ces expériences pour les orientations futures de la profession. Huit travailleuses sociales et travailleurs sociaux de différents milieux ont été interviewés. Nos analyses suggèrent que bien que tous les participants aient vécu des expériences négatives dans le cadre du travail de première ligne durant la pandémie, la fréquence et l’intensité de ces expériences ont été exacerbées par les politiques et le contexte organisationnel. Les travailleuses sociales et les travailleurs sociaux ont signalé des périodes de détresse plus importantes lorsqu’ils devaient oeuvrer en dehors de leur champ de pratique, que leurs compétences n’étaient pas prises en compte ou qu’elles étaient sous-utilisées et que les contextes organisationnels priorisaient la détresse individuelle plutôt que le soutien collectif. Si nous voulons maintenir la santé et le bien-être de nos travailleuses et travailleurs, et préserver la valeur de notre profession, il importe d’interventir de manière systémique et préventive. Des strategies telles que le soutien collectif par les pairs, le debriefing, la mobilisation de l’expertise des travailleuses sociales et des travailleurs sociaux pour intervenir au plan psychosocial, et l’inclusion des voix des travailleuses et travailleurs de première ligne dans le développement de solutions pour répondre aux difficultés reliées à la pandémie pourraient aider à réduire la détresse et améliorer leur réponse aux problèmes sociaux.

Antimicrobial resistance killing more than HIV and malaria

Speed read Antibiotic-resistant infections led to more than 1.2 million deaths in 2019 – Lancet study True picture could be much worse, with added impact of COVID-19, experts warn Urgent policy measures needed in developing countries, say researchers [NEW DELHI] Antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections resulted in more than 1.2 million deaths worldwide in 2019, exceeding the number caused by HIV/AIDS and malaria, says a study spanning 204 countries and territories. In Sub-Saharan Africa, deaths attributable to AMR mainly resulted from Streptococcus pneumoniae (16 per cent) or Klebsiella pneumoniae (20 per cent), while in high-income countries nearly 50 per cent of the deaths attributable to AMR were due to Escherichia coli (23 per cent) or Staphylococcus aureus (26 per cent). According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “improving antibiotic prescribing and use is critical to effectively treat infections, protect patients from harms caused by unnecessary antibiotic use, and combat antibiotic resistance.”

Branch Lines

In October we met to 'discuss the way forward' as the buzz-phrase has it, and we think we saw one;as in November John Peck delivered an interesting talk on 'Dickens and Science';and in December we braved the Omicron appearance by holding a Christmas meeting, with readings and seasonal refreshments, music provided by member Julie Weaver. ROMA HUSSEY Broadstairs On Saturday 12 February a public event entitled 'Happy Birthday Mr Dickens!' was held at the Pavilion in Broadstairs to celebrate the 210th birthday of Charles Dickens. The Dickens Declaimers performed 'The Jellyby Family' from Bleak House, followed by 'Celebrating a Life', a script consisting of character vignettes as varied as Mr Sapsea, Miss Havisham, Mr Jingle, Louisa Gradgrind and Lady Dedlock amongst others. According to new research, Mr Dick and Miss Havisham were both modelled on two real people who were residing in the area when Dickens visited.

Relationship between Sensitivity Tendency and Psychological Stress Reactivity in Healthy Students

This study examined the relationship between sensory processing sensitivity and psychological stress reactivity in 69 healthy Japanese university students. The Japanese version of the Highly Sensitive Person Scale and the Japanese version of the Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile were used for subjective assessment. The Galvanic skin response was measured as an objective measure of stress responses while the participants were completing the Stroop task. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test, the Spearman rank correlation coefficient, and the Mann–Whitney U test were conducted for data analysis. The results demonstrated that there was no significant correlation between the Japanese version of the Highly Sensitive Person Scale and Galvanic skin response. However, there was a marginal trend toward significance between low registration in the Japanese version of the Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile and Galvanic skin response (rs = 0.231, p < 0.10;rs = 0.219, p < 0.10), suggesting that self-rated sensitivity was not necessarily associated with objective measures. These results indicate that sensory processing sensitivity analyses require the consideration of the traits and characteristics of the participants and multifaceted evaluations using a sensitivity assessment scale other than the Japanese version of the Highly Sensitive Person Scale.

INTEGRATING CLIMATE CHANGE INTO PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION

Despite its vast potential to shape the global security environment, climate change remains underrepresented in national security curricula, including professional military education institutions. This article draws on the authors' experience leading the first climate security course offered at the National War College to illustrate a viable approach to building climate literacy among national security practitioners and related audiences. This article describes the course structure, explains the key topics discussed, and highlights essential pedagogical considerations for teaching climate security to rising strategic leaders and professional audiences. The authors intend for their experience to provide a roadmap for other instructors who seek to incorporate global climate change into their national security or political science courses at all academic levels.

12 QUESTIONS TO TAUKONDJO SEM SHIKONGO

An interview with scientist Taukondjo Sem Shikongo is presented. Among other things, Shikongo talks about today's most pressing environmental problem.

Branch Lines

PAUL GRAHAM Broadstairs 2020 being the 150th anniversary of Dickens's death, the Broadstairs Branch of the Fellowship decided to site two new benches on Nuckell's Gardens, opposite the Dickens House Museum, to commemorate this event. The gardens, home of the famous 'Donkeys!' scene in David Copperfield, are maintained by the Broadstairs Dickens Fellowship, and in normal times have been our venue each September for our outdoor meeting with a glass of wine and a reading by the Dickens Declaimers. [...]we did manage to organise a meeting for 8 September, at which Professor Tony Pointon gave us an interesting talk entitled 'Dickens and the Detectives', and he brought along some copies of his latest book - Charles Dickens's Last Case: Edwin Drood and the Curious Incident of the Unasked Question for sale to members. On the more local level The Danish Dickens Society has begun a cooperation with the local library in Copenhagen about A Christmas Carol this coming Christmas.

From transparency to accountability of intelligent systems: Moving beyond aspirations

A number of governmental and nongovernmental organizations have made significant efforts to encourage the development of artificial intelligence in line with a series of aspirational concepts such as transparency, interpretability, explainability, and accountability. The difficulty at present, however, is that these concepts exist at a fairly level, whereas in order for them to have the tangible effects desired they need to become more concrete and specific. This article undertakes precisely this process of concretisation, mapping how the different concepts interrelate and what in particular they each require in order to move from being high-level aspirations to detailed and enforceable requirements. We argue that the key concept in this process is accountability, since unless an entity can be held accountable for compliance with the other concepts, and indeed more generally, those concepts cannot do the work required of them. There is a variety of taxonomies of accountability in the literature. However, at the core of each account appears to be a sense of “answerability”;a need to explain or to give an account. It is this ability to call an entity to account which provides the impetus for each of the other concepts and helps us to understand what they must each require.

Take a Number: How Citizens’ Encounters with Government Shape Political Engagement Elisabeth Gidengil, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020, pp. 248

Take a Number: How Citizens’ Encounters with Government Shape Political Engagement Elisabeth Gidengil, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020, pp. 248 Impatiently refreshing a government web portal to get a COVID-19 test result, sitting in on a child's virtual school day, applying for emergency income support—lately, we have all spent a lot of time with our public service providers. Before the publication of Elisabeth Gidengil's latest book, Take a Number: How Citizens’ Encounters with Government Shape Political Engagement, we would have had very little evidence on hand to help us understand the relationship between public service experiences and Canadians’ political views and activities. Alongside these public service reforms, the adoption of artificial intelligence, increasingly ambitious models of data collection and use, and the ever-present influence of corporate technology vendors on government make for a public service landscape in flux and at risk of eroding public confidence in the Canadian welfare state.