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Assessing sustainability and improvements in US Midwestern soybean production systems using a PCA–DEA approach
- Fengxia Dong, Paul D. Mitchell, Deana Knuteson, Jeffery Wyman, A.J. Bussan, Shawn Conley
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- Journal:
- Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems / Volume 31 / Issue 6 / December 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 20 November 2015, pp. 524-539
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- Article
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Documentation of on-farm sustainability in agricultural sectors is becoming an essential element to ensure market access. An assessment process was developed to help soybean farmers document practices and verifiable advances in community, environmental and economic sustainability. Technical difficulties in analyzing and summarizing such assessment data include a large number of practices, correlation in variables, and use of discrete measures. By combining non-negative principal components analysis and common-weight data envelopment analysis, we overcame these difficulties to calculate a composite sustainability index for each individual farm and for the farm group as a whole. Applying this method to assessment data from 410 US Midwestern soybean farmers gave average sustainability scores of 0.846 and 0.842 for the soybean-specific and whole-farm assessments, respectively. Scenario analysis examined the impact if the bottom 10% of growers adopted the top ten sustainability drivers identified by the analysis. The average sustainability score only increased by 2%, but the minimum score increased from 0.515 to 0.647 for the soybean-specific assessment, and from 0.624 to 0.685 for the whole-farm assessment, while the lowest 10th percentile increased from 0.635 to 0.819 for the soybean-specific assessment, and from 0.634 to 0.920 for the whole-farm assessment. These results suggest that significant advancements could be made through focused efforts to improve adoption of sustainable practices by soybean farmers at the lower end of the spectrum.
26 - Risk management in rehabilitation practice
- from Part 4 - Special topics in psychiatric rehabilitation
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- By Shawn Mitchell, Consultant Psychiatrist, St Andrew's Healthcare, Northampton
- Edited by Frank Holloway, Sridevi Kalidindi, Helen Killaspy, Glenn Roberts
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- Book:
- Enabling Recovery
- Published online:
- 02 January 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2015, pp 391-408
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Summary
Introduction
‘Risk’, as a noun, implies a danger of ‘loss, injury or other adverse circumstances’ or ‘commercial loss’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). In mental healthcare the ‘injury’ or ‘loss’ clearly applies to the service user or to others, or to both, caused by the service user, or inflicted upon the service user owing to that user's vulnerability. For professionals and healthcare organisations, risk has an additional element: the financial and reputational consequences of something being perceived as having gone wrong. Risk management involves attempts at both minimising the harms experienced by service users and others and the potential for reputational risk or blame. Our focus is on how to minimise harm, but it has to be acknowledged that many of the risk management practices, policies and procedures adopted by mental health services primarily work to decrease the potential for blame.
While media attention is skewed towards concerns about the risks that service users might pose to others, the reality remains that users are more likely to pose a risk to themselves or be the victim of violence and aggression than to engage in serious violence. Rehabilitation practitioners will be aware of the risks of vulnerability and of service users being exploited by others. Risk, in the sense of trying things out, is part of everyday living and inherent in every life choice and decision. Learning from experience reinforces self-confidence, capacity and coping skills, all necessary components of rehabilitation, and consequently supported risktaking can foster recovery and personal development. It follows that the focus of risk assessment and management should be on safety enhancement rather than risk reduction (Morgan, 2007).
Service users are referred to rehabilitation services not only because of treatment resistance, chronicity or their complex needs (many patients in contact with generic services and living in the community have these characteristics) but also because of concerns about safety/risk as a consequence of these factors. Safety is a key issue when considering admission to or discharge from rehabilitation services and deciding what support a service user requires in the community.
11 - Working with challenging behaviour
- from Part 2 - Treatment approaches
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- By Shawn Mitchell, Consultant Psychiatrist, St Andrew's Healthcare, Northampton, Sanjith Kamath, Consultant Psychiatrist, St Andrew's Healthcare, Northampton
- Edited by Frank Holloway, Sridevi Kalidindi, Helen Killaspy, Glenn Roberts
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- Book:
- Enabling Recovery
- Published online:
- 02 January 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2015, pp 171-187
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Summary
Introduction
‘Challenging behaviour’ is a phrase that has gained much currency within mental health services since it was first introduced in the 1980s. The initial usage of the term was confined to descriptions of problematic behaviour in younger individuals with intellectual disabilities but it has since been generalised to similar behaviours across the spectrum of psychiatric diagnoses and irrespective of age. Despite its acceptance in everyday psychiatric parlance, the precise meaning and definition of ‘challenging behaviour’ is often unclear and the phrase has been used as a substitute for a diagnosis or as a pejorative term to encompass those aspects of the behavioural manifestations of mental disorder that are less well understood and consequently difficult to manage.
It is likely that all clinicians working with behaviourally disordered patients will be familiar with the term ‘challenging behaviour’, and while most will have a notion of what they mean when using the phrase, a precise definition is hard to articulate. Emerson (1995) defined it as follows:
culturally abnormal behaviour of such an intensity, frequency or duration that the physical safety of the person or others is likely to be placed in serious jeopardy, or behaviour which is likely to seriously limit use of, or result in the person being denied access to, ordinary community facilities.
It is of significance that a diagnosis of a mental disorder or illness is not a prerequisite to classify an individual's behaviour as challenging if it meets the above broad criteria. It is therefore important for mental health practitioners to understand that challenging behaviour is not a diagnosis and can be observed in individuals with no mental disorder. It is most usefully conceptualised as a social construct that describes behaviours that fall well outside the usually accepted ideas of ‘normal’.
Types or categories of challenging behaviour
Classifying challenging behaviour allows clinicians and sometimes the patient to identify the processes involved in the expression and consequences of the behaviour. Challenging behaviours can be divided into those that are likely to cause harm to the person and those that might lead to harm to others. Each of these can be further subdivided into direct and indirect behaviours.
5 - Recovery in secure environments
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- By Shawn Mitchell, Associate Medical Director and Consultant Psychiatrist, St Andrew's Healthcare, Ian Callaghan, National Service User Lead, My Shared Pathway
- Edited by Geoffrey L. Dickins, Philip Sugarman, Marco Picchioni
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- Book:
- Handbook of Secure Care
- Published online:
- 02 January 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2015, pp 67-83
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Summary
Introduction
The concept of recovery in mental health can be encapsulated by three words: hope, opportunity and control. Hope is essential in sustaining all people through times of difficulty. The opportunity to make friends, sustain relationships, to work and to partake in educational and recreational activities is key in helping people to develop a sense of personal identity. Being in control of matters that are significant in one's everyday life is psychologically important, as is maintaining one's self-control.
In the past decade, recovery has become the clinical model for the delivery of mental health services in the UK. Following from previous guidance such as A Common Purpose: Recovery in Future Mental Health Services (Care Services Improvement Partnership et al, 2007) and Refocusing the Care Programme Approach (Department of Health, 2008), which promoted recovery-oriented mental health services, the cross-government mental health outcomes strategy for England (No Health without Mental Health; HM Government, 2011) placed recovery-based practice at the centre of mental health service delivery. Recovery-oriented services have been further supported through Implementing Recovery: A Methodology for Organisational Change, a joint project between the NHS Confederation and the Centre for Mental Health, using the ten organisational challenges identified by the Centre for Mental Health (Shepherd et al, 2009).
In this chapter we examine what the concept of recovery means for users of secure mental health services. We discuss the barriers to recovery and identify how hope, opportunity and choice can be supported. We then examine how changes can be embedded at an organisational level to support patient recovery in secure settings on a personal level.
Recovery and mental health
There are a number of definitions of recovery; a comprehensive and commonly used one is:
‘a deeply personal, unique process of changing one's attitudes, values, feelings, goals, skills and/or roles. It is a way of living a satisfying, hopeful and contributing life, even with limitations caused by illness. Recovery involves the development of new meaning and purpose in one's life’ (Anthony, 1993).
Contributors
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- By Giustino Albanese, Andrew Amaranto, Brandon H. Backlund, Alexander Baxter, Abraham Berger, Mark Bernstein, Marian E. Betz, Omar Bholat, Suzanne Bigelow, Carl Bonnett, Elizabeth Borock, Christopher B. Colwell, Alasdair Conn, Moira Davenport, David Dreitlein, Aaron Eberhardt, Ugo A. Ezenkwele, Diana Felton, Spiros G. Frangos, John E. Frank, Jonathan S. Gates, Lewis Goldfrank, Pinchas Halpern, Jean Hammel, Kristin E. Harkin, Jason S. Haukoos, E. Parker Hays, Aaron Hexdall, James F. Holmes, Debra Houry, Jennifer Isenhour, Andy Jagoda, John L. Kendall, Erica Kreisman, Nancy Kwon, Eric Legome, Matthew R. Levine, Phillip D. Levy, Charles Little, Marion Machado, Heather Mahoney, Vincent J. Markovchick, Nancy Martin, John Marx, Julie Mayglothling, Ron Medzon, Maurizio A. Miglietta, Elizabeth L. Mitchell, Ernest Moore, Maria E. Moreira, Sassan Naderi, Salvatore Pardo, Sajan Patel, David Peak, Christine Preblick, Niels K. Rathlev, Charles Ray, Phillip L. Rice, Carlo L. Rosen, Peter Rosen, Livia Santiago-Rosado, Tamara A. Scerpella, David Schwartz, Fred Severyn, Kaushal Shah, Lee W. Shockley, Mari Siegel, Matthew Simons, Michael Stern, D. Matthew Sullivan, Carrie D. Tibbles, Knox H. Todd, Shawn Ulrich, Neil Waldman, Kurt Whitaker, Stephen J. Wolf, Daniel Zlogar
- Edited by Eric Legome, Lee W. Shockley
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- Book:
- Trauma
- Published online:
- 07 September 2011
- Print publication:
- 16 June 2011, pp ix-xiv
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