Clinical audit is a process that ensures that healthcare is provided to patients in line with standards set in national and international clinical guidelines. Information from audit informs healthcare providers and patients where the healthcare service is doing well by maintaining standards and shows where further improvement is needed. It is an ongoing process that is repeated once changes have been implemented, ensuring that quality of services is constantly improving and maintained.

Risk management is a process that focuses on improving the quality and safety of healthcare services through a process of identifying the risks and then acting to control and prevent these from happening again. Risk management is an integral part of clinical governance and essential for all healthcare professionals to be aware of.

Scientific research leads to the generation of new knowledge and is either basic or applied. A question is formulated first, followed by the creation of a hypothesis that needs to be tested. Research in obstetrics and gynaecology can explain the physiology of the reproductive system, the physiology of pregnancy and various clinical abnormalities. Clinical research is carried out through clinical trials. Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard and are performed in four phases with the involvement of patients. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses form the basis of evidence-based medicine. Performance of high-quality research should be controlled by the rules and regulations of national research governance policy to ensure patient safety and ethical issues are adhered to. Research misconduct is a serious failure that leads to incorrect results. Researchers must be aware of the moral rules governing research as well as the consequences for themselves and science.

Chapter 2 traces the development of the IRGC’s efforts to document the Iran-Iraq War, including the people, activities, and publications that make up that enterprise. It focuses on the project’s origins and foundations, the work undertaken to record the history of the war as the conflict was ongoing, the methodology and approach applied to those efforts, and the publications that have resulted therefrom and on which the present book is based. In doing so, it demonstrates that the development of the IRGC’s documentation of the war mirrors the evolution of both the Iran-Iraq War and the IRGC as a whole, which highlights how the project emblematizes the organization and the war’s centrality to its legitimacy and identity. It argues, in other words, that in order to understand the IRGC, we must understand its members not just as Guards but also as historians.

Medical research is the basis of better health for the world’s people. Family planning provides among the best examples of the powerful association between research and health. Modern contraception and safer abortion are direct products of fifty years of basic and clinical, laboratory and population-based, research. Over the past 20 years training specifically for contraception and abortion research has created a “new generation” of investigators who are building the “evidence-base” for contraceptive and abortion care. This chapter identifies some of the most important contributions of the graduates of “The Fellowship in Family Planning” and their colleagues at leading medical schools and hospitals, WHO, CDC and other research organizations. It describes their training in research methods and the impact it has had on clinical practice and women’s health worldwide.

Although academic obstetrician-gynecologists were important advocates for legal abortion, few teaching hospitals became sources of abortion care in the USA. Instead, private clinics provided nearly all abortions and medical students and residents had little opportunity to learn about abortion. Likewise, when contraception was earlier legalized, the major sources became Planned Parenthood and public health department clinics funded through the US Government’s Title X Program. Academic organizations responsible for training obstetrician-gynecologists recognized these deficiencies and moved to require training in family planning and to set standards for it. A few major teaching hospitals provided models for such training. Their efforts were emulated and financially supported at training programs around the USA through the “Ryan Residency Training Program in Abortion and Contraception” reaching one hundred programs over a 20-year effort. Because teaching hospitals largely ignored abortion and their reproductive endocrinologists were busy with IVF, academic training programs failed to develop researchers in abortion and contraception. In response to the need for clinical research and teaching in family planning, post-residency fellowship programs were simultaneously established in 30 medical schools, eventually leading to recognition in 2020 of “Complex Family Planning” as one of the official subspecialties of obstetrics and gynecology.

Through a history of the Central African Copperbelt in the first half of the twentieth century, this chapter sets the scene for subsequent analysis. It explains the similarities and differences in the early development of the Northern Rhodesian and Belgian Congolese Copperbelts, addressing labour migration and stabilisation, mine company and colonial state policies and the identification of the Copperbelt as a ‘modern’ urban region of Africa experiencing rapid social change and therefore in need of surveillance, intervention and research. The chapter then analyses the ideas and activities of Anglophone and Belgian research institutes and the ways their assumptions and approach framed understandings of the Copperbelt. It then examines the participation of African actors in these research and knowledge production processes and considers the ways in which Africans understood the nature of Copperbelt society in the mid-twentieth century.

The final chapter takes a closer look at the intersections between each of the previously covered topics, starting with sounds and structure. Readers make connections between phenomena from different linguistic domains coming together to create interesting consequences in the surface-level representations of a variety of languages. More connections are drawn between other domains, and the chapter transitions into a discussion of the scientific rigor approprate for linguistic investigation. Included in this discussion is a review of various devices used for linguistic research. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on the importance of ethical conduct in all investigations, and the ways a rigorous scientific approach can expose injustice.

Vulnerability is widely accepted as a relevant concept in human research regulation. Reflecting this, influential international research ethics guidelines require identification of, and protections for, participants who are deemed vulnerable. Nonetheless, vulnerability is challenging to conceptualise and define, with ongoing disputes about the nature and extent of moral obligations to the vulnerable. This chapter maps the history of vulnerability in human research ethics guidelines and explores current debates regarding the role of vulnerability in guiding ethical deliberations about research participation.

British psychiatry is almost entirely publicly funded; in the United States, a tradition of well-remunerated private practice has prevailed. Despite similar therapeutics and nosology, psychiatry in Britain and the United States has developed in strikingly different ways. Psychoanalysis once dominated US psychiatry; in a big swing of the pendulum, it has been almost entirely replaced by psychopharmacology. In Britain, the research tradition in the past was weak; in the United States, it has been fuelled by large amounts of government funding. A British hesitancy about embracing large abstract theories has no US counterpart. In terms of training, a progressive agenda has been emphasised in Britain, more defensive postures in the United States.

Archives are an important dimension of Stoppard’s work. The extensive collection of his papers at the Harry Ransom Center show the range of his interests and activities, as well as the development of his various projects. Archives also play an important and often ironic role within many of his texts, suggesting that researchers should exercise caution in interpreting the historical and biographical record.

The role played by mathematics in Stoppard’s theatre is both formal and epistemological. It is a tool for visualisation, providing shape and structure for the quandaries faced by his characters; it also serves as a model for ways of thinking that can integrate contradiction, instability, and unpredictability into a frame of knowledge.

Access and allocation firmly ground the concept of human security in the larger context of social justice, posing serious challenges for equitable earth system governance. The focus on capabilities brings together a range of ideas addressed inadequately in traditional approaches to the economics of welfare. The capabilities approach highlights the importance of real freedoms in the assessment of persons’ relative level of advantage, promoting a more realistic balance of materialistic and non-materialistic factors in evaluating human welfare and a concern for the distribution of substantive opportunities within society. Research on access to and allocation of environmental resources in a deliberative system of democratic governance builds on and extends an existing limited research literature on the implications of deliberative democratic practices for environmental justice policy and governance. More equitable access to and allocation of environmental “goods” should be a focus for a next generation of environmental research characterized by improved normative understanding as well as more meaningful and reflexive potential for sustainability transformation.