The education of Service children: findings of a National Audit Office consultation
Abstract: This briefing paper was prepared to help inform the House of Commons Defence Committee’s inquiry into the education of Service children, its third in a series of inquiries looking at the Armed Forces Covenant. The Armed Forces Covenant was published in May 2011 and sets out the relationship between the nation, the state and the Armed Forces. The Covenant sets out that children of members of the Armed Forces should have the same standard of, and access to, education (including early years services) as any other UK citizen in the area in which they live.
Abstract: Context: In response to the opioid crisis, federal guidelines were implemented, including the Veterans Health Administration's (VA) Opioid Safety Initiative in 2013. The impact of policies on patients near the end of life is unknown. Objective: Examine temporal trends in opioid prescribing, pain, and opioid overdoses among Veterans near the end of life. Methods: Retrospective, time series analysis of VA decedents between October 2009 and September 2018 whose next-of-kin participated in VA's Bereaved Family Survey (BFS). Using multivariate regression to adjust for sociodemographic and clinical covariates, we examined temporal trends in outpatient opioid prescribing, uncontrolled pain based on BFS report, and opioid overdose-related hospitalizations, in the last month of life, overall and by clinical diagnosis (cancer versus non-cancer). Results: Among 79,409 decedents, mean daily outpatient opioid dose in morphine milligram equivalents in the last month of life decreased from 4.6 mg in 2010 to 2.1 mg in 2018 (adjusted change -0.20 mg/year; P