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In this thesis, I present a body of quantitative empirical work on the theme of deprivation and health, linking administrative and survey datasets to publicly available census data to provide insight into the factors affecting a range of health related outcomes. In the first paper, I investigate the impact of distance and deprivation on the uptake of extended hours services in Primary Care and conclude that there is evidence of geographical inequity in the service but that deprivation was not directly associated with rates of use. In the second paper, I analyse the trajectory of well-being over the course of the firstwave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and found that well-being decreased but bounced back in a similar way across all deciles of deprivation. In the third paper, I analyse the outcomes for hospitalised COVID patients in Greater Manchester during 2020 and conclude that there was a deprivation effect in risk of death but that the length of stay in hospital for any given patient was not associated with their level of deprivation. The work highlights that investigating health outcomes and inequalities therein is a complex and difficult task, and at the heart of this must be an understanding of what the researcher seeks to measure and how this relates to the lived experience of the study population.

Calls for more effective and modern teaching practices, higher research outputs, leaner administrative processes, greater community engagement, and more student-centred approaches to the business of higher education have intensified the challenges of working in a university. These challenges have added considerable complexity to the roles of academic staff, many of whom are facing increasing demands for which they are ill equipped to deal in terms of their formal education. To succeed in the highly competitive and changing environment that is higher education today, universities need to ensure that the requisite capabilities are developed in their academic staff. The key question underpinning this study is: how can the provision of professional development for academic staff be optimised to enhance university performance? The focus of the research is on identifying the ways in which higher education institutions provide formal offerings of professional development to academic staff, how they are organised to do this, who is entrusted with the task, and what are the strengths and limitations of the approaches taken. The research is informed by literature concerning higher education management, academic development, and strategic human resource management. Taking a critical realist ontological perspective, case studies of professional development provision in two Irish universities are presented. Findings reveal that while effective professional development is an espoused priority it is not a managed priority. While there is some evidence of good practice, the fragmented organisational structures in place for delivery of professional development reveal an absence of coordination and gaps in provision. The connection between professional development and organisational performance is loose. Recommendations are made on how the provision of professional development for academics can be managed to enhance university performance. A framework for designing performance-led professional development activities that aligns organisational and individual goals is proposed. An organisational structure that takes a more conscious approach to the management of the full range of professional development provision is put forward.

This exploratory study focuses on the experiences of 18 parolees released after serving a federal sentence of over two years into two small cities in the Southern Interior of British Columbia, Canada in terms of the supports and challenges they faced in reintegrating into communities where tolerance for ex-offenders was problematic. The study aims to provide hitherto unexamined aspects of reintegration issues from the point of view of the parolees themselves. Their interpretation of events and examination of the difficulties (and acceptance) they received in the two communities add a further dimension to discussions about successful reintegration and rebuilding of their lives after incarceration. To that end, semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed using a narrative approach that was informed by Shaw's (1930) study of the life-history in The Jack Roller and Maruna's (2001) psychosocial approach to desistance. The interviews, however, were analyzed in their entirety which kept parolee voices distinct and individual. Findings focus on three main areas: the ubiquity of transcarceral controls on parolees' lives and the impacts of generational cycles of loss and abandonment on the ability to reintegrate successfully; the impacts of mental health problems, addictions, unemployment and poverty on individual attempts to reintegrate; and the development of communities of choice within the Canadian "Metis nation" as described by Saul (2008). Related issues include the pressure to remain "invisible", a permanent "outsider", in communities upon release, and definition of successful reintegration or desistance in terms of a continuum rather than a dichotomy of "criminal"/"law-abiding citizen".