In the United Kingdom (UK), racially-minoritised (non-White) people are more likely to have poorer health outcomes and greater difficulties with accessing healthcare (Dyer, 2019). People face individual and societal adversity that can affect their physical and mental wellbeing (Gibbons et al., 2012). There are clear mental health needs for racially-minoritised people, and we must go further in understanding the barriers to help to adequately meet the needs of diverse communities. The aim of this systematic review was to understand the barriers to accessing formal mental health support for racially-minoritised people within the UK. Qualitative empirical studies published between January 1970 to December 2020 were searched for using two databases: PsycINFO and Web of Science. Studies were searched for written in English, using a clinical or non-clinical population of adults with qualitative data collection and analysis methods. Database searches and reference mining gave a total of 283 studies, with 31 duplicates removed. Considering inclusion and exclusion criteria there were 15 final studies. A second researcher (S.O’H.) was used throughout, when selecting papers, quality assessment using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) checklist, coding and developing themes using thematic synthesis. The final four themes are ‘internal and external stigma’, ‘understanding of distress and coping’, ‘competence of professionals and services’ and ‘perception and accessibility’. There are various barriers making it harder for racially-minoritised people to access mental health support. Further research is needed with individual communities and action must be taken by commissioners, services, CBT practitioners, and others to eliminate barriers and improve mental health care.

Current World Health Organization (WHO) reports claim a decline in COVID-19 testing and reporting of new infections. To discuss the consequences of ignoring severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, the endemic characteristics of the disease in 2023 with the ones estimated before using 2022 data sets are compared. The accumulated numbers of cases and deaths reported to the WHO by the 10 most infected countries and global figures were used to calculate the average daily numbers of cases DCC and deaths DDC per capita and case fatality rates (CFRs = DDC/DCC) for two periods in 2023. In some countries, the DDC values can be higher than the upper 2022 limit and exceed the seasonal influenza mortality. The increase in CFR in 2023 shows that SARS-CoV-2 infection is still dangerous. The numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita in 2022 and 2023 do not demonstrate downward trends with the increase in the percentages of fully vaccinated people and boosters. The reasons may be both rapid mutations of the coronavirus, which reduced the effectiveness of vaccines and led to a large number of re-infections, and inappropriate management.

This paper uses the case study of Gordon & Gotch, media import/exporters, to explore how the transnational sale of British media contributed to a common cultural identity within the British World. Gordon & Gotch, founded as a media import firm in Australia in 1853, opened a London branch in 1866 which became independently owned and operated in 1890. This paper argues that the London and Australasian firms of Gordon & Gotch played an important and understudied role in tying Australia to Britain through lines of business that benefitted men in Melbourne and London, creating an “imagined community” of British readers that spanned oceans. The paper also explores how the divergent strategies of the London and Australasian Gordon & Gotches in the wake of the Second World War help us to understand the timeline of Australia’s cultural disentanglement with Britain. As new political economies developed in Britain and Australia, the London firm was forced to pivot to a European or more generally “global” strategy, while the Australian firm refocused its energies to domestic and American media. The consequence for Australian consumers was a reduced presence of British media and a greater preponderance of American, Australian, and locally printed multinational media in Australia. The long history of the British and Antipodean Gordon & Gotches reveals the contingency of British media saturation in Australia and the value of business historical approaches to studying change in cultural markets.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, British governments steered manufacturing businesses to peripheral regions designated as needing more employment. This approach was delivered through a Regional Policy that deployed industrial location controls and financial incentives. Effectiveness varied over time but was dramatic in the mid-1940s, when it boosted the regional stock of secondary manufacturing to the extent that its legacy remains visible today. The literature describes how this Regional Policy was a peacetime policy, albeit one formulated during the war. This article, however, proposes that the most successful phase of Regional Policy was an extension of wartime policies governing regional manufacturing businesses producing munitions. It uses a case study of Wales to make two arguments. One is that the Regional Policy associated with the postwar period began to be implemented before the war had ended. The other is that the Board of Trade pursued the policy through repurposed wartime governance mechanisms within an economy that remained subject to onerous state controls. The case outlines a short but consequential burst of assertive state involvement that shaped business activity throughout much of regional Britain, echoing Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson’s arguments concerning “the state always being in” given its role in shaping markets, business behavior, and regulations.

The UK's Trade Remedies Authority (TRA) conducts economic assessments of the ramifications of trade remedies, the Economic Interest Test (EIT). Such assessments are not mandated by the World Trade Organization but are conducted by certain trade remedy investigating authorities, including those of Brazil, Canada, the European Union, and New Zealand. The EIT is a mandatory part of the UK trade remedy system and is arguably more transparent than similar interest tests conducted by other trade remedy investigating authorities. However, stakeholder participation remains a challenge and the TRA is working on ways to improve participation. To date, the TRA has completed 11 EITs in its trade remedy cases, with a further ten live cases. These cases cover different products, markets, and countries, across which the likely positive and negative impacts of trade remedy differ. This paper invites experts to review the TRA's EIT methodology.

Changes in abundance and distribution of marine top predators can indicate environmental change or anthropogenic pressure requiring management response. Here, we used an extensive dataset (21 years) to conduct a spatial and temporal analysis of grey seal strandings in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, close to the southern edge of the breeding range of the species. A total of 2007 strandings were reported from 2000 to 2020, increasing by 474% from 35 to 201 individuals per year during this period. The continued rise in strandings was consistent across all life stages and timeframes (5, 10 and 20 years), underpinning the suggestion of increasing abundance in the region. The observed seasonality differed by life stage, coinciding with the increased presence of animals near the coast for key life phases such as breeding, moulting and pupping. Strandings are widely distributed across the coast of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly; however, most strandings were recorded on the north coast of Cornwall (70%) where major pupping and haul out sites are found. Despite hosting several pupping and haul out sites, a small proportion was recorded on the Isles of Scilly (5%) where it is thought that strandings are particularly underreported. Describing baselines in magnitude of strandings and life-stage compositions across space and time allows future deviations in frequency, demographic composition or spatial distribution to be detected and investigated. We demonstrate the utility of long-term citizen science data to provide valuable and cost-effective information on the distribution and abundance of a highly mobile marine mammal.

UK policy discourse presents technology as a solution to challenges facing care services, including issues of quality and the mismatch between care workforce supply and demand. This discourse characterises technology as ‘transformative’, homogenous and wholly positive for care delivery, eliding the diversity of digital devices and systems and their varied uses. Our paper draws on data gathered through 34 interviews with care sector stakeholders and four in-depth case studies of UK homecare providers to comparatively analyse ‘storylines’ of technological solutions expressed by policy (macro-level), sector stakeholders (meso-level) and homecare managers and care workers (micro-level) alongside enacted experiences of technology-in-use. The ‘storylines’ presented by care sector stakeholders and homecare managers converged with those of the policy discourse, emphasising technology’s capacity to enhance quality and efficiency. Our case studies however highlighted several implications for care work and organisational practice in homecare provision: the technologies we observed sometimes produced additional tasks and responsibilities, undermining the efficiency and quality storylines. The experiences of care providers and workers engaging with technologies in homecare warrant further investigation and greater prominence to challenge a discourse which is at times overly simplistic and optimistic.