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Background: This study will evaluate the Basic Income for Care Leavers in Wales pilot (BIP), which is the most generous basic income scheme in the world. A cohort of care-experienced young people who become aged 18 during a 12-month enrolment period (July 2022-June 2023) are receiving £1,600 (before tax) per month for two years, and the Welsh Government intends this to have a range of benefits. This evaluation will examine the impact of BIP, the implementation of the pilot and how it is experienced, and its value for money., Methods: The study is a theory-based quasi-experimental evaluation, and the design and methods are informed by ongoing co-production with care-experienced young people. We will estimate the impact of BIP on participants using self-reported survey data and routinely collected administrative data. This will include outcomes across a range of domains, including psychological wellbeing, physical and mental health, financial impact, education, training and volunteering. Comparisons between temporal (Welsh) and geographical (English, using administrative data) controls will be done using coarsened exact matching and difference in differences analysis. The process evaluation will examine how BIP is implemented and experienced, primarily through monitoring data (quantitative) and interview, observational, and focus group data (qualitative). The economic evaluation will take a public sector and a societal perspective to identify, measure and value the costs and outcomes of BIP, and to synthesise the evidence to inform a social cost-benefit analysis at 24 months post-intervention., Discussion: BIP is unusual in that it targets a wide range of outcomes and is available to an entire national cohort of participants. The evaluation also has several practical constraints. Therefore, the study will use a range of methods and triangulate between different analyses to assess how successful it is. Findings will inform policy in relation to care leavers, social security and basic income studies worldwide., Competing Interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests:David Westlake is a provider of supported lodging for care leavers in Wales, which is a not-for-profit local authority service that is adjacent to the scheme being evaluated in this study. Louise Roberts is a Trustee for Voices from Care, Cymru, a not-for-profit grassroots organisation that was involved in the development and ongoing delivery of the project as government consultees., (Copyright: © 2024 Westlake et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

There is growing recognition that the public health measures employed to control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic had unintended consequences on socioeconomic security and health inequalities, having the greatest impact on the most vulnerable groups. This longitudinal study aims to explore the medium to long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent public health measures on financial security for families living in the deprived and ethnically diverse city of Bradford. We collected data at four time points before and during the pandemic from mothers who participated in one of two prospective birth cohort studies in Bradford. The findings demonstrate that the risk of experiencing financial insecurity rose sharply during the pandemic and has not returned to pre-COVID-19 baseline levels. Several individual characteristics were found to be possible predictors of financial insecurity, including homeowner status, free school meal eligibility and not working. Protective factors against financial insecurity include: living in more affluent areas; greater levels of educational attainment; and families with two or more adults in the household. Notably, families of Pakistani Heritage were found to have the greatest risk of experiencing financial insecurity throughout the pandemic. Furthermore, this study demonstrated that there were strong associations between financial insecurity and maternal health and wellbeing outcomes, with mothers experiencing financial insecurity being more likely to report unsatisfactory general health and clinically important symptoms of depression and anxiety. The findings of this study highlight that the impact of financial insecurity experienced by mothers and their families throughout the pandemic was severe, wide ranging and affected the most vulnerable. In the wake of the pandemic, the emerging cost of living and energy crisis emphasises the urgent need for policy makers to act to support vulnerable families to prevent further widening of existing health and social inequalities., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Reece et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on the mental health of international migrants globally. Chile has managed its response to the pandemic in an ongoing context of social unrest and combined regional migratory and humanitarian crisis. The country's population presents a high prevalence of common mental disorders and a high suicide rate, with limited access to mental healthcare. International migrants in Chile represent 8% of the total population, and although a socioeconomically heterogenous group, they face social vulnerability, a range of mental health stressors and additional barriers to access mental healthcare. This study describes the mental health outcomes, stressors, response, and coping strategies perceived by international migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile., Methods and Findings: A qualitative case study was carried out through individual online interviews to 30 international migrants living in Chile during the pandemic and 10 experts of the social and health care sectors. An inductive content analysis was carried out, a process during which the researchers sought to identify patterns and themes derived from the data. Participants experienced mainly negative mental health outcomes, including anxiety and depression symptomatology. Stressors included the virus itself, work, living and socioeconomic conditions, discrimination, fear for their family and distance caring. Institutional responses to address the mental health of international migrants during the pandemic in Chile were limited and participants relied mainly on individual coping strategies., Conclusions: The pandemic can represent an important opportunity to strengthen mental health systems for the general population as well as for population groups experiencing social vulnerability, if the issues identified and the lessons learned are translated into action at national, regional, and international level. Promoting the mental health of international migrants means recognising migration as a social determinant of mental health and adopting a cross-cultural as well as a Human Rights approach., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2022 Blukacz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Background and Objective: Working memory is an essential cognitive skill for storing and processing limited amounts of information over short time periods. Researchers disagree about the extent to which socioeconomic position affects children's working memory, yet no study has systematically synthesised the literature regarding this topic. The current review therefore aimed to investigate the relationship between socioeconomic position and working memory in children, regarding both the magnitude and the variability of the association., Methods: The review protocol was registered on PROSPERO and the PRISMA checklist was followed. Embase, Psycinfo and MEDLINE were comprehensively searched via Ovid from database inception until 3rd June 2021. Studies were screened by two reviewers at all stages. Studies were eligible if they included typically developing children aged 0-18 years old, with a quantitative association reported between any indicator of socioeconomic position and children's working memory task performance. Studies were synthesised using two data-synthesis methods: random effects meta-analyses and a Harvest plot., Key Findings: The systematic review included 64 eligible studies with 37,737 individual children (aged 2 months to 18 years). Meta-analyses of 36 of these studies indicated that socioeconomic disadvantage was associated with significantly lower scores working memory measures; a finding that held across different working memory tasks, including those that predominantly tap into storage (d = 0.45; 95% CI 0.27 to 0.62) as well as those that require processing of information (d = 0.52; 0.31 to 0.72). A Harvest plot of 28 studies ineligible for meta-analyses further confirmed these findings. Finally, meta-regression analyses revealed that the association between socioeconomic position and working memory was not moderated by task modality, risk of bias, socioeconomic indicator, mean age in years, or the type of effect size., Conclusion: This is the first systematic review to investigate the association between socioeconomic position and working memory in children. Socioeconomic disadvantage was associated with lower working memory ability in children, and that this association was similar across different working memory tasks. Given the strong association between working memory, learning, and academic attainment, there is a clear need to share these findings with practitioners working with children, and investigate ways to support children with difficulties in working memory., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Purpose: Antenatal anxiety and depression are predictive of future mental distress, which has negative effects on children. Ethnic minority women are more likely to have a lower socio-economic status (SES) but it is unclear whether SES is an independent risk factor for mental health in pregnancy. We described the association between maternal mental distress and socio-demographic factors in a multi-ethnic cohort located in an economically deprived city in the UK., Methods: We defined eight distinct ethno-language groups (total N = 8,454) and classified a threshold of distress as the 75th centile of within-group GHQ-28 scores, which we used as the outcome for univariate and multivariate logistic regression for each ethnic group and for the sample overall., Results: Financial concerns were strongly and independently associated with worse mental health for six out of the eight ethnic groups, and for the cohort overall. In some groups, factors such as working status, education and family structure were associated with worse mental health, but for others these factors were of little importance., Conclusions: The diversity between and within ethnic groups in this sample underlines the need to take into consideration individual social, migration and economic circumstances and their potential effect on mental health in ethnically diverse areas.

Background: There has been limited examination of the contribution of socio-economic factors to the development of leg ulcers, despite the social patterning of many underlying risk factors. No previous studies were found that examined social patterns in the quality of treatment received by patients with leg ulcers., Methods: Using The Health Improvement Network (THIN) database we identified a cohort of over 14000 patients with a diagnosis of venous leg ulceration, prospectively recorded between the years 2001 and 2006, with linked area-level socio-economic information (Townsend deprivation quintile). We assessed socio-economic differences in the incidence and prevalence of leg ulcers using negative binomial regression. Socio-economic differences in two key areas of guideline recommended leg ulcer management, arterial Doppler assessment and compression bandaging, were assessed using multilevel regression., Results: The risk of incident venous leg ulceration increased for patients living in areas of higher deprivation, even after adjustment for known risk factors age and gender. Overall reported rates of Doppler assessment and provision of compression therapy were low, with less than sixteen per cent of patients having a database record of receiving these recommended diagnostic and treatment options. Patients diagnosed with incident venous leg ulcers living in the most deprived areas were less likely to receive the recommended Doppler-aided assessment for peripheral vascular disease than patients living in the least deprived areas (odds ratio 0.43, 95% confidence interval 0.24-0.78). Documented provision of compression therapy did not vary with deprivation., Conclusions: A socio-economic gradient in venous leg ulcer disease was observed. The overall rates of people with venous leg ulcers who were documented as receiving guideline recommended care (2001-2006) were low. Reported use of Doppler ultrasound assessment was negatively associated with socio-economic status. These findings suggest that the inequalities experienced by leg ulcer patients may be exacerbated by reduced access to guideline-based management.