A national survey of restorative consultants' treatment provision for head and neck oncology patients.

AIM: To investigate current UK practices in the treatment of head and neck oncology patients by consultants in restorative dentistry. METHOD: A postal questionnaire requesting details of surgical and restorative head and neck oncology care from diagnosis to oral rehabilitation was circulated to all 315 consultants in restorative dentistry in the UK. If a reply was not received within 12 weeks a follow up was sent. RESULTS: One hundred and thirty-two (43%) completed questionnaires were returned. On average 46% of respondents treated head and neck oncology patients, this varied with geographical location. Sixty percent of consultants' weekly workload was less than 25% oncology related, while 13% indicated more than 75%. Of the cohort providing oncology care only 12% thought there was always time for dental screening pre-radiotherapy, furthermore 67% had difficulty liaising with primary care. Within the UK great variety existed between attendance at multidisciplinary team meetings, dental care professional support, and provision of dental implant reconstruction including timing, manufacturer, operator, and funding. CONCLUSION: Significant variation in dental input into head and neck oncology patients' pathways exists, most notably with pre-radiotherapy screening. This study highlights a change in trend for patient rehabilitation with dental implants, and an increase to 52% of restorative dentistry consultants' attendance during a multidisciplinary team meeting.

Academic task persistence of normally achieving ADHD and control boys: performance, self-evaluations, and attributions.

The authors examined academic task persistence, pretask expectancies, self-evaluations, and attributions of boys with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as compared with control boys. Participants were 83 ADHD boys and 66 control boys, all normally achieving. Prior to the task, performance expectancies were assessed. After a success-failure manipulation with find-a-word puzzles, performance on subsequent trials, self-evaluations, and attributions were evaluated. Compared with controls, ADHD boys solved fewer test puzzles, quit working more often, and found fewer words on a generalization task. Consistent with these behavioral findings, research assistants rated ADHD boys as less effortful and less cooperative than control boys. Although ADHD boys did not differ significantly from controls in their posttask self-evaluations, they did differ significantly from controls in some aspects of their attributions. Attributional data indicated that ADHD boys endorsed luck as a reason for success more strongly and lack of effort as a reason for failure less strongly than controls.

Parent cognitions as predictors of child treatment response in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Using a subsample of 105 children and their parents (100 mothers, 57 fathers) from the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (the MTA), the value of parents' baseline cognitions as predictors of children's treatment outcome at 14 months was examined. Measures of parents' cognitions about themselves, their ADHD children, and their parenting, as well as a self-report measure of dysfunctional discipline were included. Both mothers' and fathers' self-reported use of dysfunctional discipline predicted worse child treatment outcome. Low self-esteem in mothers, low parenting efficacy in fathers, and fathers' attributions of noncompliance to their ADHD child's insufficient effort and bad mood also were associated with worse child treatment outcome. All of these predictive relations were obtained even after MTA treatment effects had been taken into account. Secondary analyses indicated that mothers had a more external locus of control, lower self-esteem, lower parenting efficacy, and a greater tendency to attribute noncompliance to their ADHD child's bad mood than did fathers.

Teaching personal safety skills to young children: an investigation of age and gender across five studies.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the extent to which preschool-aged boys and girls can benefit from instruction in personal safety. METHOD: Data compiled from five previous studies were employed. Four hundred and six preschoolers were pretested and participated in either the Behavioral Skills Training program (BST; Wurtele, 1986) or a control program. Children were posttested on skill and knowledge gains. RESULTS: Preschoolers who had participated in the BST program demonstrated greater knowledge and higher levels of personal safety skills compared with controls. Boys and girls reacted similarly to the program, as did children from younger and older age groups. CONCLUSIONS: These results provide support for the assertion that most preschool-aged children can benefit from participating in a developmentally appropriate personal safety program. Suggestions for expanding the efforts to prevent child sexual abuse are offered, so that children do not shoulder the full responsibility for prevention.