Healthcare and legal systems responses to coercive control: an embodied performance of one woman's experience.

This paper uses a drama-based method to illustrate the responses of healthcare and legal systems to women experiencing coercive control. This approach involved writing a play using the first-person narrative voice of a victim-survivor. We presented the play at the Stop Domestic Violence Conference (Gold Coast, Australia) in 2021. The central character, 'Kate', provided an embodied performance that enabled the conference participants to see, feel and understand experiences of coercive control from a personal perspective. We followed the trajectory of coercive control from the beginning of an intimate relationship to the time of separation. We showed how the process of coercive control escalates from love bombing, reproductive coercion, isolation, and technology-facilitated abuse until a point of police intervention. As Kate told her story, the conference audience witnessed the barriers and challenges faced by survivors of coercive control, and the emotional, financial, and psychological impacts that are intensified in geographically remote environments. They watched Kate navigate health and other systems meant to help women experiencing domestic and family violence, but that ultimately failed to deliver. Finally, the drama-based approach allowed us to present a feminist embodiment of coercive control and an innovative method for communicating inter-disciplinary research findings on domestic abuse.

Integrative Oncology and the Clinical Care Network: Challenges and Opportunities.

Integrative oncology is a new and growing field of cancer care. Integrative oncology is a patient-centered, evidence-based field of comprehensive cancer care that utilizes integrative therapies such as mind-body practices, acupuncture, massage, music therapy, nutrition, and exercise in collaboration with conventional cancer treatments. Patient interest and utilization has been growing over the past two decades. Clinical research has shown the benefits of these approaches to improving symptom management and quality of life, and is now being incorporated into national guidelines from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) and American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO). The availability of these services at cancer centers is growing, although the structure and implementation of integrative oncology remains highly variable. This article discusses the benefits of integrative oncology and provides an overview of the current state of integrative oncology programs nationwide. Current challenges and opportunities for cancer centers to provide integrative services is reviewed in the areas of programmatic structure, clinical service, education, and research.

Domestic violence, coercive control and mental health in a pandemic: disenthralling the ecology of the domestic.

ABSTRACTDomestic and family violence is a social and public health issue typically positioned in policy frameworks as a consequence of gendered social and economic structures. In this paper, we deploy an approach that draws on Hörl's neo-ecological thinking to propose that the home, as a site of domestic violence, can be usefully framed as an ecology of the domestic, a posthumanist hybrid matrix of bodies, spaces and objects in which various practices enact the smooth running of the domestic together with practices of domestic and family violence, including coercive control. Our interest is in coercive control and in the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on practices which enact this aspect of domestic violence. Our exploration of the practices that enact coercive control draws on the work of Law and others. We examine how practices, which are not compatible, or that do not cohere, are able to coexist in a domestic ecology and what occurs when there is a disruption as occurred with the pandemic.

An unsettled bargain? Mothers' perceptions of justice and fairness in paid work.

Mothers' return to work following childbirth is widely recognized as a key stage in establishing employment arrangements that disadvantage them in the long run. This article investigates why mothers accept these unequal arrangements using data from a qualitative study of 109 Australian mothers. It focuses on mothers' perceptions of the fairness and justice of the flexibility of arrangements they commonly enter into upon return to work. The article draws attention to the importance of different justice frameworks, distributive, procedural and interactional, in understanding women's acceptance of gender inequality in paid work. The results indicate that most mothers view their workplace arrangements as fair, consistent with a distributive justice framework. Many women also place great importance on interactional justice, particularly in their experiences in negotiating flexibility. The article also identifies differences across employment type with women in jobs with career prospects more likely to invoke interactional justice frameworks than women in jobs with few career prospects.

Understanding gambling related harm: a proposed definition, conceptual framework, and taxonomy of harms.

BACKGROUND: Harm from gambling is known to impact individuals, families, and communities; and these harms are not restricted to people with a gambling disorder. Currently, there is no robust and inclusive internationally agreed upon definition of gambling harm. In addition, the current landscape of gambling policy and research uses inadequate proxy measures of harm, such as problem gambling symptomology, that contribute to a limited understanding of gambling harms. These issues impede efforts to address gambling from a public health perspective. METHODS: Data regarding harms from gambling was gathered using four separate methodologies, a literature review, focus groups and interviews with professionals involved in the support and treatment of gambling problems, interviews with people who gamble and their affected others, and an analysis of public forum posts for people experiencing problems with gambling and their affected others. The experience of harm related to gambling was examined to generate a conceptual framework. The catalogue of harms experienced were organised as a taxonomy. RESULTS: The current paper proposes a definition and conceptual framework of gambling related harm that captures the full breadth of harms that gambling can contribute to; as well as a taxonomy of harms to facilitate the development of more appropriate measures of harm. CONCLUSIONS: Our aim is to create a dialogue that will lead to a more coherent interpretation of gambling harm across treatment providers, policy makers and researchers.

Working from the inside out: a case study of Mackay Safe Community.

Mackay Whitsunday Safe Community (MWSC) was established in 2000 in response to high rates of injury observed in the region. MWSC assumed an ecological perspective, incorporating targeted safety promotion campaigns reinforced by supportive environments and policy. By involving the community in finding its own solutions, MWSC attempted to catalyze structural, social, and political changes that empowered the community and, ultimately, individuals within the community, to modify their environment and their behavior to reduce the risk of injury. A community network consisting of 118 members and an external support network of 50 members was established. A social network analysis conducted in 2000 and 2004 indicated that the network doubled its cohesiveness, thereby strengthening its ability to collaborate for mutual benefit. However, while MWSC was rich in social resources, human and financial resources were largely controlled by external agencies. The bridging and linking relationships that connected MWSC to its external support network were the social mechanism MWSC used to access the resources it required to run programs. These boundary-spanning relationships accessed an estimated 6.5 full-time equivalents of human resources and US$750,000 in 2004 that it used to deliver a suite of injury control and safety promotion activities, associated with a 33% reduction in injury deaths over the period 2002 to 2010. MWSC can only be understood in its ecological context. The productivity of MWSC was vulnerable to the changing policy priorities of external sponsoring agents and critically dependent on the advocacy skills of its leaders.

Improved and expanded pharmacy care in rural Alaska through telepharmacy and alternative methods demonstration project.

OBJECTIVES: To describe innovative use of technology to improve the level of pharmacy care in remote villages in rural Alaska. STUDY DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. METHODS: The Alaska Native Medical Center and outlying health clinics formed the Southcentral Foundation Pharmacy Network to provide pharmacy services to Native and non-Native patients living in the rural Anchorage Service Unit. The Alaska Native Medical Center served as the central pharmacy, purchasing drugs on behalf of the network and dispensing those drugs to patients of the network. In April 2003, four remote pharmacies began a 6 month comparison of two different telepharmacy equipment systems. The systems were assessed for various factors such as hardware and software capabilities and the customer support offered. The program was then expanded to include 12 participating sites. RESULTS: During fiscal year 2006, 22665 prescriptions were processed utilizing telepharmacy and prospective pharmacist review. There were 990 documented pharmacist consultations and interventions (4.4% of all prescriptions processed). CONCLUSIONS: Incorporation of recent technological advancements enabled the pharmacy department of the Alaska Native Medical Center to improve and expand the provision of pharmacy services to rural, isolated communities. Based upon the success of the program, future sites are being targeted for telepharmacy inclusion.