This paper provides an overview of the framework and tools developed at the Agile Manufacturing and Enterprise Centre (AMEC) at the University of Liverpool to assist Merseyside SME’s in embracing agility concepts. The framework is based on four main pillars; auditing of company, auditing of the operating environment, benchmarking and learning from best practice. This paper describes the overall...

OBJECTIVE To learn how couples stratified by gender role preference (GRP) manage food preferences. DESIGN One-time individual semistructured qualitative interview with each partner in a couple representing 1 of 3 GRP pairings. SETTINGS/PARTICIPANTS Volunteers were recruited using advertising and snowball sampling and met the criteria of both parents living at home, wife no older than 40 yea...

OBJECTIVES To define the transitional care workload of a multicentre cohort of adolescents with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) including disease, self-advocacy and vocational issues prior to the implementation of a transitional care programme. METHODS Data were collected using questionnaires completed by senior clinicians, patients and parents in 10 UK paediatric rheumatology centres. En...

Smooth muscle cells and pericytes, together called mural cells, coordinate numerous vascular functions. Canonically, smooth muscle cells are ring-shaped and cover arterioles with circumferential processes, whereas pericytes extend thin processes that run longitudinally along capillaries. Nearly a century ago, Zimmerman described mural cells with mixed features of smooth muscle cells and pericyt...

A novel subset of human regulatory B-cells has recently been described. They arise from within the transitional B-cell subpopulation and are characterised by the production of IL-10. They appear to be of significant importance in regulating T-cell immunity in vivo. Despite this important function, the molecular mechanisms by which they control T-cell activation are incompletely defined. Here we...

Histochemical enzymatic studies were performed on 30 freshly resected large bowel carcinomas, 30 samples of normal colonic epithelium, and six samples of the histologically normal epithelium (so-called transitional epithelium) immediately adjacent to a carcinoma. Five enzymes were studied: nicotine adenine dinucleotide tetrazolium reductase (NADH-TR), glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, succinat...