Hoarding disorder is a surprisingly common problem which impacts on most areas of life. People who hoard typically have multiple agencies involved in their care due to the complex health and safety impact and risks associated with hoarding. ‘Treatment’ involves finding ways of supporting discarding large amounts, typically underpinned by CBT principles. We evaluated the impact and outcomes of a conference designed to boost professionals’ confidence and understanding in working with hoarding problems, both individually and with other agencies with a view to improving inter-agency service provision. Changes in professionals’ confidence and understanding were evaluated immediately before and after the conference. Conference participants’ qualitative responses related to service improvements were analysed using content analysis. People with personal experience of hoarding issues subsequently participated in a focus group where the results of the conference were presented. These data were analysed using thematic analysis. Confidence and understanding in working with hoarding problems substantially increased from pre- to post-conference. Professionals identified a range of possible improvements, most commonly working more closely and improving communication with other agencies. People with personal experience suggested improvements across three over-arching themes: developing an improved understanding of hoarding, the need for improved resources, and improved multi-agency working. A multi-agency conference increased confidence and understanding in professionals working with hoarding problems, and improvements specified by both people with personal experience and professionals provide a useful guide to service improvement. Results provide a framework in which CBT approaches should be embedded.

The education of Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander students in Australian universities has received considerable attention in both the literature and government policy in the 21st century. The participation and graduation rates for Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander students in higher education Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs have remained low and are becoming a particular focus in universities across Australia. This paper reflects on the life and contribution of David Unaipon, the enrolment data from a small sample of universities across Australia and the literature to discuss potential strategies for improving the access to, participation in and graduation from higher education STEM courses.

Twenty-two normally developing five-year-olds were asked to judge, identify, repair and explain phonological and morphological errors. All of the errors involved the addition, substitution or omission of a single phoneme, which in the morphological task, was also an inflectional morpheme. Stimuli were controlled for type of error (omission, addition, substitution), location of the error (word final) and word status of the resulting error (word, non-word). Children performed significantly better on the phonological task than on the morphological task. It is proposed that the results are due to differences in the type and location of linguistic information to be analysed and to differences in memory demands in the tasks.

The issue of detention as a tuberculosis control measure has resurfaced following the prolonged detention of a patient with an extensively drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis in a prison cell in Arizona, and the attempted detention in Italy and subsequent detention in Atlanta, Georgia of an American sufferer thought to have XDR-TB in May 2007. These cases have reignited the debate over the evidence that supports detention policy in the control of tuberculosis, and its associated legal and ethical ramifications. This paper considers whether involuntary detention is justified where voluntary measures have failed or where a patient poses a danger, albeit uncertain, to the public, and discusses the need for strengthening evidencebased assessments of public health risk.

Although food supply statistics are commonly used in ecological studies of diet and disease, little information is available on how they compare with reported intakes of foods. The objective of the present study was to compare fruit and vegetable availability with estimates of national mean intakes derived from national food consumption surveys. Food availability statistics from the FAO were used. For each country, mean national supply, based on at least 3 years of FAO data, was calculated. National estimates of mean fruit and vegetable intakes were derived from population-based surveys from fifteen countries, gathered for the World Health Organization Global Burden of Disease Study revision for 2000. Extrapolations were made when survey data did not cover all age groups. For each country, the FAO:survey estimate ratio was calculated. This ratio ranged from 0·93 to 2·70 (median value=1·39). Although there was a tendency for FAO data to overestimate intakes (fourteen out of fifteen countries), the degree of overestimation varied greatly among the countries included in this study (5–270 %). As food supply statistics are the only source of information on dietary patterns in most countries of the world, further information on how they reflect food intakes is needed. Obtaining detailed and valid estimates of dietary intakes in more countries around the world will be essential for such comparisons.