Under the Radar: Service Children and Higher Education in England Report
This report addresses a significant gap in the sector’s understanding of Service children and higher education in England examining the present situation in terms of policy, practice and evidence where access to higher education for Service children in England is concerned.
It focuses especially, on the decision by the Office for Students not to include Service children in the first iteration of its Equal Opportunities Risk Register (EORR) launched last year arguing that this decision poses a threat to widening access work with Service Children and the activities of many NEON members. The report includes a series of recommendations directly relevant to the practice of NEON members including asking the Office for Students to include Service Children in the EORR. It also includes examples of leading practice in widening access work with Service children from higher education providers and Uni-Connect partnerships.
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