Museological review

Museological review is an online journal edited by research students at the University of Leicester’s Department of Museum Studies. The journal aims to provide a forum for a research community frequently split across many diciplines. Topics covered are as varied as archaeology, cultural heritage, contemporary art, science and anthropology. The website includes the current issue and back issues as PDF files. Issue 12 (2007) includes the proceedings of the AHRC-sponsored conference, ‘Material Culture, Identities and Social Inclusion’, which took place in Leicester early in 2006.

British Museum research

This part of the British Museum website details individual research projects and includes subjects in the fields of archaeology, art history, anthropology, world cultures and museology. Additionally, the website makes available a limited number of fulltext research publications as well as bibliographic details of all the museums publications. The pages also include a link to the Museum’s online collections database of its two dimensional pictorial art holdings, and details of the Museum’s own archives and Paul Hamlyn reference library.

Countryside quality counts : tracking change in the English landscape

The Countryside Quality Counts project (CQC) assesses how the countryside is responding to climate change and other environmental impacts in England. The website provides information about the project, results of the research including headline indicator maps, and related publications which can be downloaded as PDF files. CQC is sponsored by Natural England, in partnership with DEFRA and English Heritage.

‘Back on Track’: White Paper

From NCB:”This White Paper, Back on Track, sets out in further detail the Government’s strategy for achieving the Department for Children, Schools and Families’ commitment to improve alternative educational provision through better commissioning; planned and monitored provision; stronger accountability; and stronger intervention when existing alternative provision fails to perform.”It is available here, on the Department for Children, Schools and Families website.

How do psychologists study what we know about ourselves?

A short piece, with comments, on self-reports and self-perception. Read about it here, from the BPS Research Digest blog.

Music can help people recover from stroke

 

Given its power to move us, perhaps it’s no surprise that a great deal of research has focused on whether or not music can help people with depression or anxiety. Now researchers in Finland have asked whether music can benefit people recovering from stroke. Their study is notable for its sound methodological quality, and the results are promising: music does indeed appear to make a difference to patients’ cognitive recovery.

Read the article here.

Services for people with learning disability and challenging behaviour or mental health needs

 

“This practice guidance, the “Mansell Report” was published by the Department of Health in 2007and updates guidance originally published in 1993, referring also to the strategy paper Valuing People, published in 2001. It makes a series of recommendations, including more local education and care, rather than residential care; short “respite” breaks for families; smaller services and individualised care should be commissioned; personal budgets and direct payments should be used and the use of psychiatric hospitals only for short term, targeted care.”

Read it here.

Lots from Children’s Newsfeed

Better care, better lives: This is the first Children’s Palliative Care Strategy which calls on local commissioners, providers and regulators to devise local strategies to enable every child and young person with a life-limiting or life-threatening condition to have access to high-quality, family centred, sustainable care and support with services provided in a setting of choice according to the child’s and family’s wishes. It sets out clear expectations for improving choice, access and continuity of care, and seeks to place palliative care at the centre of local children’s service provision. 

How to set and monitor goals for prevalence of child obesity: This guidance follows on from the publication of the Government’s obesity strategy Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives: A Cross-Government strategy for England.  The guidance provides advice to PCTs and local authorities on how to set child obesity goals as part of the Vital Signs and the National Indicator Set. This will be followed shortly with full guidance on developing local plans. 

Aiming high for disabled children: A draft of the Aiming High for Disabled Children ‘core offer’ for families is being tested with key stakeholders. This document informs local authorities, PCTs, voluntary and independent organisations and families with disabled children of what is on offer.

Right time, right place: This report, published by the Care Services Improvement Partnership (CSIP), outlines the progress made in innovative practice of 19 projects, which were a joint initiative from the DH and the then DfES.

 

More in hope than expectation

Don’t get too excited, it’s just the title of a newly published article which may be of benefit to midwives! Click the link to read abstract of More in hope than expectation: Women’s experience and expectations of pain relief in labour: A review. A systematic review of studies which examined experience and expectations of pain and its relief in labour.

Free will…?

Found this quite interesting: research using brain imaging methods has reinforced earlier research which found that free will is an illusion. Read all about it here.