This study evaluates the implementation of Safewards on an assessment and treatment unit (ATU) for people with an intellectual disability. There are no previous studies evaluating this model in this context and previous research has focused largely on acute mental health services. The ‘Patient–Staff Conflict Shift Report’ was used at baseline for 1 month and 1 year later, after all the interventions had been implemented, to evaluate the impact of Safewards. Significant reductions were found in conflict and containment measures used within the service after the implementation of Safewards. Staff who led on the interventions were also asked to give feedback on their experiences, the challenges they faced and how they would like to move forward. Safewards was generally seen as a positive approach by the team. Limitations of this study are highlighted and suggestions for future research are made.

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1. The open-source programming language ‘R’ has become a standard tool in the palaeobiologist’s toolkit. Its popularity within the palaeobiology community continues to grow, with published articles increasingly citing the usage of R and R packages. However, there are currently a lack of agreed standards for data preparation and available frameworks to support implementation of such standards. Consequently, data preparation workflows are often unclear and not reproducible, even when code is provided. Moreover, due to a lack of code accessibility and documentation, palaeobiologists are often forced to ‘reinvent the wheel’ to find solutions to issues already solved by other members of the community.2. Here, we introduce palaeoverse, a community-driven R package to aid data preparation and exploration for quantitative palaeobiological research. The package is freely available and has three core principles: (1) streamline data preparation and analyses; (2) enhance code readability; and (3) improve reproducibility of results. To develop these aims, we assessed the analytical needs of the broader palaeobiological community using an online survey, in addition to incorporating our own experiences.3. In this work, we first report the findings of the survey which shaped the development of the package. Subsequently, we describe and demonstrate the functionality available in palaeoverse and provide usage examples. Finally, we discuss the resources we have made available for the community and the future plans for the broader palaeoverse project.4. palaeoverse is the first community-driven R package in palaeobiology, developed with the intention of bringing palaeobiologists together to establish agreed standards for high-quality quantitative research. The package provides a user-friendly platform for preparing data for analysis with well-documented open-source code to enhance transparency. The functionality available in palaeoverse improves code reproducibility and accessibility, which is beneficial for both the review process and future research.

The Murut tribe of Sabah (formerly North Borneo) numbered 30,300 in 1921, decreased to 18,700 in 1951, and increased again to 22,100 in 1960. In 1951, the tribe was a small diminishing section of a slowly growing population; in 1960 it was increasing itself, and the growth rate of the whole population had shot up. Marked variations in the age structures of the Murut and other indigenous tribes accompanied these changes. Between 1920 and 1960 several investigators attempted to explain the decline, but could not show why only one tribe was failing to hold its own among many others which were increasing. Their findings are summarized, and unpublished data from the 1960 census are given which suggest that increasing contacts with the rest of the population, earlier thought to be an important contributor to the decline, were probably the means of saving the Murut from extinction.

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