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This document was developed by a group of over two dozen pain clinicians and investigators from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany Ireland, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway. Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom and funded by an educational grant form Mundipharma International, Limited. The stated aim of the White Paper is to identify inequalities in government policies towards opioids that contribute to inadequate treatment of pain. It calls for their replacement with policies that will support doctors and patients in their efforts to relieve pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The European Disability Strategy (2010-2020) seeks to significantly raise the proportion of people with disabilities working in the open labour market. The ERGO WORK project is a collaboration of academic and industrial partners in six European countries, focused on understanding and tackling barriers to workplace inclusion for workers with disabilities. Methods: This study sought to explore the perceptions and needs of stakeholders in terms of workplace adaptation to the needs of employees with disabilities. An exploratory online survey was completed by 480 participants across six countries. Results: The analysis suggests that workplaces could be further improved to meet the needs of employees with considerable scope for training within companies to raise awareness about employees' needs, employers' obligations and workplace adaptation. Conclusions: This snapshot suggests there is still a gap between intent and reality in workplace inclusion and further strategies are needed to improve the opportunities for employees with disabilities. The paper argues that ergonomics may have a key role to play in tackling these challenges and adapting the workplace environment and job design to suit the needs of individual employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working fewer than full-time hours has been seen as a crucial way in which women workers can balance demands from home and paid work. But working part-time holds a range of negative repercussions for other aspects of worker's lives, in particular their economic well-being. Examining objective and subjective indicators of economic well-being, the paper uses data from the European Community Household Panel Survey to consider the ramifications of working short hours for women in Europe. The paper is concerned with the generalisability of the very weak situation of part-timers in Britain. It asks whether and how the economic problems faced by women at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy differ according to societal context. The papers shows that part-time low level workers had the lowest monthly wages relative to their compatriots in each country examined, though the intensity of wage disadvantage varied substantially across the sample. The research did not uncover a universal positive correlation between women's relative wage positions and individual level measures of economic well-being, however. The most prevalent association between working part-time in a low level occupation and facing a weak economic position occurred at the level of household economies. The paper concludes by asking how we best research economic well-being, including whether it should be approached via an individual or household level analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging consensus among scholars of Muslim political and social identity suggests that Western Muslims live out an anti-essentialist critique of identity construction. Considering this view, this paper examines a cross-national comparison of British Bangladeshis in London and Spanish Moroccans in Madrid that solicits the perceptions of working-class Muslim men. While the results indeed reaffirm respondents' concomitant relationships to a variety of identity paradigms, interview content demonstrates that subjects' multiplicity is complicated by their desire to meet – not reject – the essentialist standards of belonging to the identity paradigms discursively available to them. Rather than defiantly cherry-picking preferred characteristics of religion, ethnicity and nationality, individuals' responses suggest that they are trying to fulfil perceived standards of authenticity. Such a contention helps explain the prevalence of Western Muslims' expressed and well-documented ‘identity crisis’, suggests the enduring relevance of identity essentialisms, and more broadly, complicates post-modern conceptions of identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reviews the current English-language literature on police and mentally ill offenders in Europe, including the UK. Opportunities are being lost at the first point of contact of people with mental illness (PMI) with the police, to divert them to treatment. Nevertheless a number of promising programs in the UK, notably those in London, Birmingham, and Belfast (Northern Ireland) are described, which do divert PMI from police stations for psychiatric assessment and treatment. Since there are still many mentally ill offenders slipping through the net and ending up in prison - attested to by their continuing representation in the ever-increasing prison population - it is widely recognised that there is a need for more training for police and for the provision of psychiatric services at the police station - a role where community psychiatric nurses have proved very effective. More funding is needed for appropriate facilities in the community where PMI can be placed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]