Yes / To survey the diagnostic radiography workforce in the United Kingdom (UK) at an organisational level to ascertain the scope of advanced practice and compliance with Health Education England standards for multiprofessional advanced clinical practice (ACP). 174 diagnostic imaging departments were invited to participate in a cross-sectional electronic survey focused upon advanced level practice and their educational and accreditation expectations (October-December 2019). Breast imaging, computed tomography, fluoroscopy, interventional radiology, lithotripsy, magnetic resonance imaging and projectional radiography were included. A total of 97 responses were received, of which 79 were eligible for inclusion (45%). Respondents reported advanced-level practice roles across all imaging modalities, which included clinical reporting, procedural-based and combined roles. Radiograph and mammogram reporting were most prevalent (95 and 67% of Trusts), with fluoroscopy the most frequent procedure-only role (25%). Only 39% of trusts required adherence to the four pillars of ACP within job descriptions, and only 12% requiring a full Masters qualification. Diagnostic radiographer reporting and procedure-based roles in the NHS are varied and widespread. However, inconsistencies in fulfilment against the expected standards for advanced practice exist. Realignment of advanced-level roles to delineate enhanced and advanced clinical practice may ensure consistency between roles and professions. A requirement for accreditation as an advanced (clinical) practitioner with adherence to advanced practice requirements could therefore provide value to accreditation for both individual practitioners and Trusts. Within the UK, diagnostic radiographer roles previously self-identified as advanced-level practice may be termed enhanced practice when not adhering to expected ACP standards.

Yes / There has been an increase in development of technologies that can deliver personalised dietary advice. Devising healthy, sustainable dietary plans will mean taking consideration of extrinsic factors such as individual social circumstances. The aim of this study was to identify societal groups more or less receptive to and likely to engage with digitally delivered personalised nutrition initiatives. Sample and Methods: Volunteers were recruited via a social research agency from within the UK. The resultant sample (N=1061) was 49% female, aged 18-65 years. Results: MANOVA (Tukey HSD applied) indicated that females and younger people (aged 18-29 years) had more favourable attitudes and were more likely to intend to adopt personalised nutrition. There were no differences in attitude toward or intention to adopt personalised nutrition between different education levels, income brackets or occupational groups. Conclusion: These results imply that females and younger people may be most likely to adopt personalised nutrition in the future. Initiatives to promote personalised nutrition should target males and older people.

Yes / Rationale and Perceptions of frailty can influence how families cope, quality of life and access to support services. Yet little is known of how lay members of the UK general public perceive frailty. This scoping review aimed to explore how frailty is perceived among the lay public in the United Kingdom. Methods: The established scoping review methodology by Arksey and O’Malley was followed and searches were conducted across eight electronic databases and grey literature websites for articles published between 1990 and August 2022. In total, 6,705 articles were identified, of which six were included in the review. Data were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis framework. Results: Three key themes were identified; frailty as a normal part of ageing, perceived consequences of frailty and coping with frailty. Overall, frailty has negative connotations and is perceived as linked to a natural part of the ageing process, increased dependency, loss of identity and social exclusion and stigma. However, it is unclear whether these perceptions have a direct bearing on access to support services for communities. Conclusion and implications: This review identifies that it is imperative for health and social care service providers to consider the individual meaning of frailty for older people and families, to understand and integrate their particular needs and preferences when planning and delivering person centred frailty care and support. There is also a need for development of interventions that focus on increasing education and reducing stigma around frailty in order to change frailty perceptions in the UK. / This report is independent research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Yorkshire and Humber Applied Research Collaborations NIHR200166.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and fill out the appropriate web form. / This manuscript of poems considers—as its title suggests—elements of mythology and the small town in No Man’s Land that rest in the middle, between the world of concept and the world of physical imagery. These middle-elements often embody the margin, watching the world as if the world’s innards are visible, and considering the infinite implications of the events that occur. These poems have an alliance with what is in between and always follow a muse, whether Kalliope or some whisper of the divine. It is through this lens, and in the borders, that these poems suspect meaning and create questions. / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

My dissertation project seeks to understand when and how do national judges play an active and significant role in how international legal orders do or do not affect their polities. Specifically, I look at when and how British judges play a role in how European Union law through the European Court of Justice and European human rights law through the European Court of Human Rights affect the British polity. These international legal orders contain both vertical and horizontal aspects. Vertical aspects include the highest court and its judges defined by the treaty, which operates as the international, hierarchical authority on the treaty and is tasked with ensuring the compliance of the member states of the treaty. Horizontal aspects include member state courts and judges who interact with other member state courts and judges as equals voluntarily to share an understanding of the law. Britain is interesting because it may seem like a counterintuitive place to find such dynamics. Britain has a strong resistance to international authority, a deeply entrenched idea of Parliamentary Supremacy, and a dualist legal tradition where Parliament translates international law into domestic law prior to its use by the courts, which contributes to a lack of expectation of British judges engaging in international judicial activism, making Britain a hard case. In this context, we should expect that international law only matters to the extent that domestic actors are forced to incorporate it by a strong international legal order with vertical supremacy and unambiguous authority. To the contrary, my dissertation shows that British judges are quite active in many international legal orders in ways that do not merely reflect the degree of established vertical legal authority. Through dynamics that are quite autonomous from British politicians' difficult interactions with international authority, British judges play a very active role in managing and integrating international law into British politics. To see these dynamics and understand how international law has affected British politics, we must pay special attention to horizontal legal integration. Horizontal legal integration occurs when judges intentionally and selectively borrow legal concepts and precedents from other national or international jurisdictions.

Previous studies of identity and representation fail to fully recognise the complexity of identity and its inherent relevance to representation. In addition, they insufficiently acknowledge the institutional factors which mediate the performance of identity in representation. This thesis moves beyond this existing research by more critically analysing the relationship between identity and political representation through the lens of performative claim-making. Given that both representation and identity are concepts which have come to be understood as complex and multiply constructed, their interrelationship deserves a more critical and nuanced analysis. I argue that identity inherently shapes representative roles. Representation as a concept can be modelled as a series of claims to and understandings of representation. By applying Goffman’s interpretation of identity as performance, claims to representation are therefore a series of performative moves which evoke identity strategically and vary according to context and audience. Through the examples of the two case studies of New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the thesis explores the ways that MPs perform their identities in three distinct contexts: web biographies, maiden speeches and interviews. These allow for comparisons of contexts or ‘stages’ for performance of identity by MPs and shows how claim-making plays out in reality for MPs. I argue that performance of identity by MPs will vary depending on the method of selection of the MP, parliamentary norms and culture, and the audience. The potential for variation of performance due to contextual shifts requires an explicit consideration of the institutional factors which impact a representative’s performative role. Political space - its rules and regulations and its culture and norms – needs to be incorporated in more depth into studies of representation, claim-making and performance because these factors impact the extent to which MPs will engage with and perform identity within their representative roles. By investigating the ways in which MPs perform identity in different contexts and with different audiences, we can better understand the relationship between the two concepts of identity and political representation.

This thesis explores the process of elite sport policy change in three sports (swimming, athletics and sailing/yachting) in Canada and the United Kingdom (UK). The nature of policy change is a complex and multi-faceted process and a primary aim of the study is to identify and analyse key sources of policy change in four elements of elite sport programming: i) the development of elite level facilities; ii) the emergence of 'full-time' swimmers, athletes and sailors; iii) the adoption of a more professional and scientific approach to coaching, sports science and sports medicine; and iv) competition opportunities and structures at the elite level. The study focuses on the meso-level of analysis, which centres on the structures and patterns of relationships in respect of three Canadian national sporting organisations (NSOs) and three UK national governing bodies of sport (NGBs) - representing the three sports cited above. The macro-level of analysis is also considered, where the primary concern is to analyse relations of power between governmenta nd quasi-governmentasl porting agenciesa nd the respective NSOs/NGBs. A case study approach is adopted, focusing on the six NSOs/NGBs, wherein a qualitative methodology is utilised in order to elicit data in respect of policy change in the four key elements of elite sport programming set out above. Within the case study approach, the advocacy coalition framework has proved useful in drawing attention to the notion of changing values and belief systems as a key source of policy change, as well as highlighting the need to take into account factors external to the policy subsystem under investigation. In Canada, it is evident that the preoccupation with high performance sport over the past 30 years, at federal government level, has perceptibly altered over the past two to three years. In contrast, in the UK, from the mid-1990s onwards, there has been a noticeable shift towards supporting elite sport objectives from both Conservative and Labour administrations. The study concludes that it is only by exploring specific sports through a comparative-analytic framework that a better understanding of policy change, within the complex and multi-layered sport policy process, might be achieved.

This thesis investigates how family–employment reconciliation issues associated with single motherhood affect women’s employment careers. The study fills a gap in the literature, which rarely considers single motherhood and employment as processes in the life course, much less in a cross-country comparative perspective. Patterns of employment trajectories during and after single motherhood are examined as the outcome of individual and institutional circumstances. Great Britain and West Germany are used as contrasting cases that represent relatively different contexts of labour market structures and family policy. Longitudinal individual-level data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) are analysed, looking at the period between and including 1991–2008. The thesis develops a theoretical model that assumes differential career outcomes for experiencing single motherhood at different life stages. Higher difficulties of family–employment reconciliation are predicted for women experiencing single motherhood at a young age compared to later stages. The acquisition of marketable resources, which stands in the context of education systems, is assumed to be one of the central mechanisms mediating the relationship between age at single motherhood and employment. Moreover, policies directed at single parents affect reconciliation, shaping opportunity structures on which women can draw in single motherhood. Compared to the German context, Britain provides little institutional support securing labour market attachment for women in single motherhood, particularly when their children are young. Although providing more generous family policy measures in comparison, West German maternity leave regulations are often not applicable to women in single motherhood, and childcare is mostly granted on a half-day basis. The findings from three steps of empirical analysis provide new insights and highlight specific facets of established facts. First, fixed effects logistic regression is used, which exposes a negative association between single motherhood and entering full-time employment. No differences are observed between partnered and unpartnered mothers, but effective childcare arrangements support women’s transition in both Britain and West Germany. The second step of the analysis explores employment career patterns during and after single motherhood using sequence analysis. The emerging typical patterns are observed to different degrees in the two country contexts. On average, more employment trajectories dominated by non-employment are observed in Britain and by part-time employment in West Germany. In the last step, these findings are used in an explanatory framework, the results of which provide evidence for the life stage hypothesis. The analysis demonstrates that not only social class but also mother’s age, children’s age and skill levels seem to foster employment stability and labour market attachment during and after single motherhood.

This study is motivated by the numerous reforms to strengthen the efficacy of corporate boards and their oversight committees, in the wake of high profile corporate failures. The empirical question, however, is whether recent proposals would enhance board and their committee effectiveness and in this way, reduce the likelihood of firm`s failure. This study examines whether the composition, structure and functions of corporate boards and their interactions are related to the probability of corporate failure. Prior studies employ agency and resource dependency theories in isolation as theoretical lenses. This study, however, employs these aforementioned theories as theoretical lenses and argues that the board control and resource function affects the relationship between corporate board attributes and corporate failure. This study examines a sample of 358 UK listed firms, consisting of 95 failed firms and 263 non-failed firms during the period 1999-2011. This study also uses a unique hand-collected data set that measures the corporate governance attributes and functions of these 358 firms over a period of five years preceding failure or otherwise, resulting in 1748 firm-years observations. This study reveals that the probability of failure is lower in firms with large board size, former government officials, independent remuneration committee chairman and greater proportion of outside directors as well as effective audit and remuneration committees. This study also finds that the prospect of corporate failure is higher in firms with less than three independent NEDs on both the audit and nomination committees, without audit committee and where audit committee has no one with financial expertise. The results, however, suggest that the possibility of corporate failure is higher in firms whose boards have a female director and where the nomination committee meets often or where its membership is exclusively preserved for independent NEDs. On the interaction effects, the results show that frequency of board meetings as well as its interactions with presence of female directors, audit and remuneration committees effectiveness are positively related to the probability of corporate failure. The results also indicate that a number of interactions between corporate board attributes and functions are unrelated to the likelihood of corporate failure. These include the interactions between board composition measures (i.e. proportion of outside directors, presence of female directors and board size) and the board resource proxy (i.e. former government official). These associations, especially remuneration committee effectiveness, remuneration committee chairman independence, firm size and profitability, are not only statistically and economically significant but also robust to different specifications. Further, the Receiver Operating Curves indicate that the impact of corporate governance measures after controlling for firm size, liquidity, profitability, age, industry effects, and leverage is more profound in two years preceding failure. The implication of this is that corporate governance mechanisms alone are insufficient to rescue the firm on the verge of collapse. The findings are consistent with the idea that failing firms decline in size, managerial performance, corporate board attributes as well as their board`s ability to discharge it`s monitoring and resource roles. This study adds to the debate on the impact of corporate governance on corporate failure by developing, analysing and testing a robust UK corporate failure prediction model which is underpinned by a multi-theoretical framework: agency and resource dependency theories. This study also offers several recommendations for policy makers and firm-level corporate governance strategies in the mix of the numerous corporate governance reforms worldwide, this in particular makes this study unique.

This study examines the intellectual capital (IC) disclosure practices in the annual reports of 100 listed UK firms selected from sectors considered to be IC-intensive. It also investigates the possible determinants of such disclosure practices from the three perspectives of corporate governance structure, company characteristics and market factors. IC disclosures were captured using content analysis, and were measured by a disclosure index, supported by word count and percentage of word count metrics to assess the variety, volume and focus of IC disclosure respectively, at both overall and subcategory levels. The presentational formats and locations of IC disclosures were also recorded. The results indicate that the UK firms sampled provide considerable IC information in their annual reports, mainly in text form, with popular use of numerical information, while the use of graphs and pictures for many IC elements remains low. The distribution of IC disclosures, captured in three categories, varies by the three measures of disclosure applied. IC information was found in virtually all sections of the annual report and was most concentrated in the Operating and Financial Review section. IC terms typically used in the academic literature do not feature in the sampled annual reports. The results of the statistical analyses based on the three measures of IC disclosure indicate significant associations with a number of corporate governance factors (i.e. board composition, share concentration, audit committee size and frequency of meeting, board directors' shareholding, audit committee directors' shareholding, and board directors with cross-directorships), company characteristics (i.e. firm size, profitability, and listing age), and market factors (i.e. 'hidden value', share price volatility, share turnover, and multiple listing). These findings offer support for a number of theories, such as information asymmetry, agency and signalling theory. The influence of these explanatory factors on human, structural and relational capital disclosures, based on all three disclosure measure metrics, as well as on the format of IC disclosure, was also explored. The study also finds that its IC framework is more effective than a less detailed framework used in prior studies for the purpose of examining IC disclosure practice and its determinants. The study contributes to the further advancement of the state of knowledge in relation to IC disclosure both empirically and methodologically. It provides information users, preparers, regulatory bodies and academics with a state-of-the-art understanding of IC disclosure practices in the annual report. The transparent content analysis process enables future replication and comparison of results. The rigorous measurements of IC disclosure, the greater specificity of disclosure about the location and presentational format, and the more detailed IC research framework can be usefully applied by other studies. By examining the relationship between explanatory factors and IC disclosure, it helps shareholders and other groups of information users as well as the regulatory bodies to identify factors that may encourage IC disclosure in the annual report.