Arts

Objective To identify factors associated with the quality of primary medical care incentivised under the new UK general medical services contract. Design Cross sectional study. Setting NHS Ayrshire and Arran area, Scotland. Participants 60 general practices. Main outcome measures Quality scores reflecting the total points achieved on the 10 clinical domains and holistic care. Univariate and multivariate regression analyses were used to relate quality scores to measures of population characteristics, urban-rural location, general practitioner characteristics, clinical team size and composition, practice characteristics, and income from other sources. Results Deprivation was associated with higher scores. Quality scores increased with the size of the clinical team. Practices with higher income from other sources had lower quality scores. Practices that were accredited, had training status, or contained younger general practitioners had higher quality scores, but these effects were explained by other associated factors. 53% of the variation in quality scores was explained by a multivariate model, which included measures of deprivation, clinical team size and composition, and financial incentives. Conclusions Population characteristics showed little association with the quality of primary medical care incentivised under the UK general medical services contract. Larger clinical teams delivered higher quality clinical care, but the nurse-doctor composition of the clinical team did not influence quality. Practices that were more likely to respond to financial incentives because of previous behaviour or lower income from other sources recorded higher quality. If generalisable, the results suggest that initiatives to improve primary medical care quality should focus on the structure and resourcing of providers.

Background: Health policy in the UK has rapidly diverged since devolution in 1999. However, there is relatively little comparative data available to examine the impact of this natural experiment in the four UK countries. The Quality and Outcomes Framework of the 2004 General Medical Services Contract provides a new and potentially rich source of comparable clinical quality data through which we compare quality of primary medical care for coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, hypertension and diabetes across the four UK countries.

Background: Health professionals, policy-makers and researchers need to be able to explore potential associations between prevalence rates and quality of care with a range of possible determinants including socioeconomic deprivation and morbidity levels to determine the impact of commissioning and service delivery. In the UK, data in England are only available nationally at practice postcode level. In Scotland, such data are available based on an aggregate of the practices population's postcodes. The use of data assigned to the practice postcode may underestimate the association between ill health and income deprivation. Here, we report on the impact of using data assigned to the practice population by comparing analyses using English and Scottish data.

This study presents specific ahadīth (sing. hadīth) which inform neighbourly relations on a day-to-day basis. I interpret my actions towards a neighbour, who was experiencing personal problems, as lived-hadīth citizenship. That is, my interactions with my neighbour were infused with Prophet Muhammad's teachings and instructions as found in ahadīth. Aspects of Prophetic wisdom, such as care and easing somebody’s burdens, align with contemporary sociological, anthropological, and psychological definitions of citizenship. This study thus shows that Islamic scripture has a positive role to play in Western societies, shaping daily behaviours such as being a good citizen in one’s neighbourhood.

This study examines the emotional dynamics of the written and oral texts of Tabligh Jama’at—respectively, Faza’il-e-A’maal (Virtues of Good Deeds) and bayan (religious sermon). In them, the study identifies emotion work—the attempt to generate certain emotions. The study discusses how the texts’ emotion work relates to Tablighi discursive ideology (framing) and also posits several emotions that the emotion work might generate. From these findings, the study offers the idea that Tablighi emotion work contributes to transforming Muslims’ emotional sphere by attaching them emotionally to ultimate religious concerns. By enchanting Muslims’ emotional sphere and attaching Muslims to Islamic social actors, values, practices, and Islamic revivalist goals, Tablighi emotion work contributes to the social transformation of individuals and society.

This study investigates Ayaan Hirsi Ali's view that adherence to Islam is not viable in secular liberal societies of the West, owing to a so-called clash of norms and values. For Hirsi Ali, this clash causes cognitive dissonance in Muslims and makes them withdraw to Muslim enclaves or become radicalised. This study evaluates these claims by comparing them to findings from ethnographic research with Muslims in the West. The data on Muslim religious life shows, for the most part, Muslims in the West can practice Islamic rituals and behaviours owing to social, individual and religion factors, such that what emerges is a fluid way of life that fits into a secular liberal society. Hirsi Ali's views are thus a misrepresentation of adherence to Islam. The study takes this to be the outcome of her lack of empirical research with Muslims.

IN THE late 1940s, George Orwell wrote his nightmarish novel 1984, depicting a future world where an all-seeing but unseen tyrant, Big Brother, ruled over his citizens by watching their every move. In this paranoid dystopia, surveillance was purely a ''top-down'' affair, a government tool for controlling the hapless masses: privacy was a crime, the Thought Police punished dissent and history was rewritten daily for political ends.

More than half a century later, it is worth considering how Orwell's fictional prediction weighs up against reality. If Big Brother's gaze dominated that imagined future, who's watching over us now?

CHANCES are you entered this world screaming your head off, and your poor mum was likely doing the same: birth is seldom a quiet event. From that rowdy start, life requires us to navigate a complex love-hate relationship with noise to strike a balance between the sounds we hear, and those we make.

Sound raises questions about personal space, relative rights, and how we live with others. But the real discord stems from sound's rowdier cousin, noise. Tricky to define, ignore or regulate, noise is an emotionally charged topic. Add high-density apartment living, leaf blowers and Celine Dion ringtones, and it's no wonder noise has spawned lawsuits and murder trials.

"Knowing history is how a society knows itself. If you just pluck out the pretty elements of the story and ignore the darker side, that’s a perversion of history. There’s a reason why those buildings were built that way, and if we as a society have the strength of character to accept all those elements, that’s a good thing.” - David Nichols, University of Melbourne.

Melbourne’s famed laneways are becoming contested territory, with the city’s growing number of rough sleepers being depicted as a threat to tourism and business interests. Following the recent evictions of people sleeping in ‘homeless camps’ in Enterprize Park and City Square, the street art precinct of Hosier Lane has emerged as a particular flashpoint.

Opinion piece published in The Age (print and online) and Sydney Morning Herald (online only), 23/24 August 2016.

The Finished People is a thought-provoking, unusual and unsettling film. It follows a group of dispossessed young people struggling to survive on Cabramatta’s tough streets; they are living homelessness in its most raw form, sleeping rough and existing from day to day.

In Australia, the AEC is currently looking at how voting can be made more accessible for people experiencing homelessness, and says it plans to consult with the homelessness sector on this issue. It is important to ensure already stretched homelessness services are not lumped with extra work they are not resourced to do.

The Columbine High School massacre lasted sixteen minutes and left a total of fi fteen people dead. For a stunned America, denied the chance to seek an explanation from the boys who had pulled the trigger, one question resounded in the vacuum: why?