Nottingham Trent University

About: Nottingham Trent University is a education organization based out in Nottingham, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Addiction. The organization has 4702 authors who have published 12862 publications receiving 307430 citations. The organization is also known as: NTU & Trent Polytechnic.

The state of health care and adult social care in England.

Abstract: SUMMARY 2 Foreword This year's State of Care report shows that, despite increasingly challenging circumstances, much good care is being delivered and encouraging levels of improvement are taking place. However, the sustainability of this position is in doubt. We are also beginning to see some evidence of deterioration in quality, and some providers who are struggling to improve their rating beyond 'requires improvement'. The fragility of the adult social care market and the pressure on primary care services are now beginning to impact both on the people who rely on these services and on the performance of secondary care. The evidence suggests we may be approaching a tipping point. The combination of a growing and ageing population, people with more long-term conditions and a challenging economic climate means greater demand on services and more problems for people in accessing care. This is translating to increased A&E attendances, emergency admissions and delays to people leaving hospital, which in turn is affecting the ability of a growing number of trusts to meet their performance and financial targets. While large numbers of care homes and home care agencies are providing good quality care – and three-quarters of those that we had rated as inadequate, and then re-inspected, improved – this still left a quarter of services originally rated inadequate that did not improve enough to change their overall rating on re-inspection. Through our market oversight function in adult social care, we also know that profit margins are reducing – both due to pressures on fees, and cost pressures that include the national living wage. Already we are seeing some providers starting to hand back home care contracts as undeliverable; local authorities predict more to come. Until recently, the growth in demand for care for people with greater care needs had been met by a rise in the number of nursing home beds, but this bed growth has stalled since April 2015. The financial challenges in the NHS have been extensively documented. Despite this, we have found much good and outstanding care – particularly in children's and young people's services and critical care – which we highlight and celebrate. We have given outstanding ratings to five acute trusts and two mental health trusts, and five trusts have exited special measures since April 2015. However, we have also found too much acute care that we rated inadequate – particularly urgent and emergency services and medical …

Benchmarking the reliability of QikProp. Correlation between experimental and predicted values

Abstract: The theoretical prediction power of the software package QikProp was tested. This was achieved by comparing experimentally known results to predicted values. First, simple molecular descriptors for physicochemical properties: octanol-water partition (log P), water solubility (log S), dipole moment, Ionisation Potential (IP) and Electron Affinity (EA) were compared to their experimentally determined counterparts. For all of the descriptors, except EA, a relatively good linear correlation was obtained. Experimentally derived EA values are relatively scarce and often quite inconsistent, which made it difficult to construct a reliable test collection. When compared to values calculated by the Density Functional Theory (DFT) method a reasonable correlation was observed but there is much room for improvement. A clear Gaussian distribution pattern was obtained when a collection of similar to 470 marketed orally bioavailable drug compounds was used to generate the physicochemical properties investigated. The idea was explored whether the prediction power of ADME modules could be tested in a qualitative way, based on broad assumptions, using different classes of marketed drug compounds. It was found that this approach gives one a good idea about which modules deserve further attention for evaluation. In this way it is concluded that cell permeation and the blood - brain barrier modules merit more evaluation work whereas work on the HERG K+ and CNS activity modules was discontinued.

Multiple streams in EU policy-making: the case of the 2005 sugar reform

Abstract: The multiple streams model, developed by Kingdon in the United States (US), is being adapted increasingly to study European Union (EU) policy-making. This, however, is revealing a theoretical underdevelopment in some of its central components. The present paper considers several concerns. It seeks to develop the idea of policy entrepreneurship as a context-specific activity that gives substance to the claim that ‘ideas have their time’; it interprets the key notion of ambiguity, in the EU context, to mean institutional ambiguity; and it allows for spillovers between policy areas to be endogenous as well as exogenous. This affects the nature of the policy windows wherein policy entrepreneurship occurs. The adapted multiple streams model is used to analyse the 2005 EU sugar policy reform. Institutional ambiguity and endogenous spillovers are shown to create the conditions that enabled active policy entrepreneurship to lead, ultimately, to reform of this most resilient of policies.

Pavement crack detection using the Gabor filter

Abstract: Crack is a common form of pavement distress and it carries significant information on the condition of roads. The detection of cracks is essential to perform pavement maintenance and rehabilitation. Many of the highways agencies, in different countries, are still employing conventional, costly and very time consuming techniques which involve direct human intervention and assessment. Although automated recognition has been successfully performed for many pavement distresses, crack detection remains, to this date, a topic where reservations exist. A novel approach to automatically distinguish cracks in digital pavement images is proposed in this paper. The Gabor filter is proven to be a highly potential technique for multidirectional crack detection that was not done previously using the Gabor filter. Image analysis using the Gabor function is directly related to the mammalian visual perception, hence the choice of this method for crack detection. Results reported in this paper concentrate on pavement images with high levels of surface texture that makes crack detection difficult. An initial detection precision of up to 95% has been reported in this paper showing a good promise in the proposed method.