This SHEA white paper identifies knowledge gaps and challenges in healthcare epidemiology research related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with a focus on core principles of healthcare epidemiology. These gaps, revealed during the worst phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, are described in 10 sections: epidemiology, outbreak investigation, surveillance, isolation precaution practices, personal protective equipment (PPE), environmental contamination and disinfection, drug and supply shortages, antimicrobial stewardship, healthcare personnel (HCP) occupational safety, and return to work policies. Each section highlights three critical healthcare epidemiology research questions with detailed description provided in supplementary materials. This research agenda calls for translational studies from laboratory-based basic science research to well-designed, large-scale studies and health outcomes research. Research gaps and challenges related to nursing homes and social disparities are included. Collaborations across various disciplines, expertise and across diverse geographic locations will be critical.

This article explores the transportation of Indian convicts to the port cities of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean during the period 1789 to 1866. It considers the relationship between East India Company transportation and earlier and concurrent British Crown transportation to the Americas and Australia. It is concerned in particular with the interconnection between convictism and enslavement in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Examining the roots of transportation in South Asia in the repressive policies of the East India Company, especially in relation to its occupation of land and expropriation of resources, it moves on to discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in Moulmein, Singapore, Mauritius, and Aden. This includes their labour regime and their relationship to other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was part of a carceral circuit of repression and coerced labour extraction that was intertwined with the expansion of East India Company governance and trade. The Company used transportation as a means of removing resistant subjects from their homes, and of supplying an unfree labour force to develop commodity exports and to build the infrastructure necessary for the establishment, population, and connection of littoral nodes. However, the close confinement and association of convicts during transportation rendered the punishment a vector for the development of transregional political solidarities, centred in and around the Company's port cities.

The ideal sampling method and benefit of qualitative versus quantitative culture for carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) recovery in hospitalized patient rooms and bathrooms is unknown. Although the use of nylon-flocked swabs improved overall gram-negative organism recovery compared with cellulose sponges, they were similar for CRE recovery. Quantitative culture was inferior and unrevealing beyond the qualitative results.

This article explores the British Empire’s configuration of imprisonment and transportation in the Andaman Islands penal colony. It shows that British governance in the Islands produced new modes of carcerality and coerced migration in which the relocation of convicts, prisoners, and criminal tribes underpinned imperial attempts at political dominance and economic development. The article focuses on the penal transportation of Eurasian convicts, the employment of free Eurasians and Anglo-Indians as convict overseers and administrators, the migration of “volunteer” Indian prisoners from the mainland, the free settlement of Anglo-Indians, and the forced resettlement of the Bhantu “criminal tribe”. It examines the issue from the periphery of British India, thus showing that class, race, and criminality combined to produce penal and social outcomes that were different from those of the imperial mainland. These were related to ideologies of imperial governmentality, including social discipline and penal practice, and the exigencies of political economy.

The essays in this volume provide a new perspective on the history of convicts and penal colonies. They demonstrate that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a critical period in the reconfiguration of empires, imperial governmentality, and punishment, including through extensive punitive relocation and associated extractive labour. Ranging across the global contexts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Japan, the Americas, the Pacific, Russia, and Europe, and exploring issues of criminalization, political repression, and convict management alongside those of race, gender, space, and circulation, this collection offers a perspective from the colonies that radically transforms accepted narratives of the history of empire and the history of punishment. In this introduction, we argue that a colony-centred perspective reveals that, during a critical period in world history, convicts and penal colonies created new spatial hierarchies, enabled the incorporation of territories into spheres of imperial influence, and forged new connections and distinctions between “metropoles” and “colonies”. Convicts and penal colonies enabled the formation of expansive and networked global configurations and processes, a factor hitherto unappreciated in the literature.

Background: The evidence regarding whether co-morbid obsessive compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) is associated with treatment outcomes in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is mixed, with some research indicating that OCPD is associated with poorer response, and some showing that it is associated with improved response. Aims: We sought to explore the role of OCPD diagnosis and the personality domain of conscientiousness on treatment outcomes for exposure and response prevention for OCD. Method: The impact of co-morbid OCPD and conscientiousness on treatment outcomes was examined in a clinical sample of 46 participants with OCD. Results: OCPD diagnosis and scores on conscientiousness were not associated with poorer post-treatment OCD severity, as indexed by Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS) scores, although the relative sample size of OCPD was small and thus generalizability is limited. Conclusion: This study found no evidence that OCPD or conscientiousness were associated with treatment outcomes for OCD. Further research with larger clinical samples is required.

The paper reflects on developments in leaving care policy and practice in Western Australia (WA) and nationally from the mid-1990s. The review of national and some international literature suggests that current Australian policy and practice shows a ‘systems stuckness’ that requires a more potent form of annual auditing and reporting of jurisdictional leaving care outcomes. The review of mostly Australian publications focusing on leaving care and the risk of homelessness includes reflections on recent developments in leaving care services in England, which recognise and restore relationship-based services for care leavers. Finally, the history, vision and initial impact of the Living Independently for the First Time (LIFT) Project, a case study of learning by doing, is outlined. The authors and their colleagues from the Department for Child Protection and Family Support (Midland District), Swan Emergency Accommodation (now known as Indigo Junction) and the Housing Authority of WA have collaborated to design and develop the LIFT Project. This initially unfunded action-research strategy involves inter-agency policy and practice designed to prevent homelessness of vulnerable care leavers.