Background Awareness and knowledge of FASD among health and social care professionals remains low. As Scotland integrates FASD into neurodevelopmental pathways, assessing staff knowledge is vital to guide future training and ensure equitable diagnostic access. Method An online survey was employed, assessing respondents’ FASD-related knowledge and attitudes, was distributed to health and social care professionals across Scotland through NHS Health Boards and Health and Social Care Partnerships. Results A total of 897 staff completed the questionnaire, of whom 60% reporting receiving no FASD training, with only 11% very familiar with FASD. Medical doctors and psychologists reported higher training rates. Training and direct experience with FASD correlated with greater knowledge and fewer stigmatising beliefs. Lack of training was associated with more negative attitudes. Conclusions Significant gaps in FASD knowledge persist, especially outside specialist groups. Targeted and widespread training is needed training is needed to identify potential cases, reduce stigma, and ensure equitable, informed care in Scotland.
Background Disability inclusion in sport depends not only on access but also on how organizations translate inclusion commitments into everyday practice. This study examined whether perceived organizational responsibility for disability inclusion differed by disability type and gender in Saudi community sports clubs and used qualitative interviews to contextualize the observed patterns. MethodsA sequential explanatory mixed-methods design was used. Phase 1 included 281 adults with physical, hearing, visual, or intellectual disabilities from five community sports clubs in Jeddah Governorate. Perceived organizational responsibility was assessed using a questionnaire developed specifically for this study. The Total Score was the primary quantitative outcome and was analyzed using HC3 heteroscedasticity-robust linear regression. Gender × Disability Type was examined exploratorily, and sensitivity analyses incorporated club fixed effects and excluded the hearing-disability group. Phase 2 comprised semi-structured interviews with 15 purposively selected participants. Results Perceived organizational responsibility differed markedly across disability groups, with participants with hearing disabilities reporting the highest scores and those with intellectual disabilities reporting the lowest. The large disability-type effect was substantially influenced by the hearing-disability group, although differences across disability types remained statistically significant after its exclusion. After adjustment for disability type, women scored 7.39 points lower than men (b = −7.39, 95% CI [−10.67, −4.11], p < .001). This association remained similar after adjustment for club fixed effects and exclusion of the hearing-disability group. The exploratory Gender × Disability Type interaction was not statistically significant (ΔR² =.0015, p = .162). Interviews identified unequal experiences of belonging, gaps in organizational support, gender-related barriers, and limited opportunities for participant voice. Conclusions Perceived organizational responsibility for disability inclusion was not experienced uniformly across participants. Disability type and gender showed distinct associations with this organizational outcome, while qualitative findings highlighted implementation, access conditions, and opportunities for participant influence as relevant features of everyday club experience. The findings support closer attention to organizational practice rather than access alone when evaluating disability inclusion in community sport.
Dyslexia, a prevalent learning disorder, significantly impairs children's ability to process written language, often leading to challenges such as letter reversals, inconsistent spacing, and scrambled writing sequences. Early detection is critical for timely intervention, yet traditional diagnostic methods such as behavioral assessments and neuroimaging—are either time-consuming, subjective, or prohibitively expensive. Recent advances in deep learning offer promising alternatives, particularly through handwriting analysis, which is non-invasive and scalable. However, the "black-box" nature of many deep learning models raises concerns about interpretability, a key requirement for clinical and educational adoption.This study introduces a novel deep learning framework combining a custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), and an Attention mechanism to detect dyslexia from handwriting samples. The study uses handwriting samples from adolescents aged 12–15 with an established dyslexia diagnosis and a control group. It therefore provides a proof-of-concept for handwriting-based classification and a foundation for early screening, rather than a validated early screening tool. The CNN extracts spatial features, while GRUs model temporal patterns in writing sequences. The Attention mechanism highlights the most discriminative regions for screening. To enhance transparency, Explainable AI (XAI) techniques such as Grad-CAM, LIME, and feature scatter plots are added to provide visual explanations of the model’s decisions.Evaluated on a dataset of 3170 handwriting images from dyslexic and non-dyslexic students, the model achieved 99.5% accuracy using leave-one-out cross validation, outperforming pre-trained models like ResNet-50. Ablation studies confirmed the CNN’s pivotal role while GRUs and Attention provided complementary improvements. These findings demonstrate technical feasibility; however, the model has not yet been evaluated in younger, undiagnosed children, and conclusions about early screening utility should therefore be interpreted with caution. XAI visualizations, such as Grad-CAM and LIME, offer interpretable saliency maps, and the results show that the predictions made by the model depend on the regions where known dyslexic characteristics, such as irregularities in letter curvature, spacing, and alignment, often occur.
