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In the spirit of the theme of this current volume, this chapter offers a contribution to care/user-involved research in terms of a personal experience. It is argued that while recognizing how difficult it is for patients/care users to be ‘fully informed’, they should at least be ‘adequately’ informed. Full information can be confusing, daunting, anxiety-inducing and not necessarily helpful to the patient or service user. But adequate information can reduce uncertainty, return some power and sense of control to the user and consequently improve the patient experience. This experience is reflected by a former educator of health professionals who is now a full-time service user – hence the ‘expertise’ offered comes from both sides of the engagement. The focus is on problems associated with waiting for treatment.

The purpose of the paper is to explore the theory and approaches employed by a novice narrative researcher to open, work in, and close the narrative space. The paper reflects on this personal journey and aims to provide insight for other novices to successfully navigate the narrative space.

This paper draws on the experiences and emotions involved in undertaking narrative inquiry as a novice researcher. The paper focuses specifically on the challenges of opening, working in and closing the narrative space.

Through a critical and reflective discussion of approaches to narrative inquiry, the papers points to key theories, and approaches, which guide narrative research. In doing this, the diversity in interpretation and application of narrative research are noted as essential components of both its challenge and beauty.

The practical implications of this paper are linked to its utility in helping others reflect on their own practice and also providing insight and support to other novice researchers seeking to navigate the narrative space.

The paper provides a subjective interpretation and application of the theory underpinning narrative research and how it was used to guide the authors research into care leavers journeys into and through university.

This paper provides a researcher's account of fieldwork experience in conducting audit research in China. By illustrating on-site fieldwork encounters, the paper reflects stages of access negotiation and management in the fieldwork, reveals the researcher's embodied “affects” in the fieldwork and reasserts the value of researcher's openness and attention in the fieldwork.

This paper uses autoethnography as its overall epistemology. Fieldwork diaries and vignettes are written in the first-person voice to present the researcher's embodied account of fieldwork experience, researcher’s learning and coping skills in managing the fieldwork.

The research findings are not detached from the researcher's experience of the fieldwork. The fieldwork experiences in this study highlight that the fieldwork access is an ongoing process. Different stages of access negotiations, from rejection to acceptance, reveal the tensions between researcher and participants. This study draws attention to the online platform, WeChat, in connecting with auditors to learn from them and suggests openness to the fieldwork encounters and a resilient engagement with auditors.

In reflecting on the researcher's transformation during the fieldwork, this paper argues for a relational and engaged way of conducting fieldwork, rather than a disengaged and judgemental approach in studying auditors' working lives. The paper pays attention to fieldwork as a process and how the knowledge learned in the field is infused with researcher's fieldwork experiences.

This paper aims to explicate one of the major findings of a research study seeking to understand how Indonesian people with diabetes learn about their disease. The one key finding discussed in this paper is how families influence the learning and self-management processes adopted by Indonesian people with diabetes.

A grounded theory methodology was adopted to investigate how Indonesian people with diabetes learn about their disease. Twenty-eight semi-structured interviews were undertaken with Indonesian people living with diabetes, families of people living with diabetes, healthcare professionals and other healthcare providers. Data was analysed by using constant comparative analysis during three coding stages.

The study explicated the basic social process of how people with diabetes in Indonesia learn about their disease through a generated theory “Learning, choosing, and acting: self-management of diabetes in Indonesia”. This study found family engagement was integral to Indonesian people living with diabetes who were self-managing their disease. Families assisted with seeking information, providing recommendations, selecting and implementing actions, appraising implemented actions, and informing others about their experiences. By acknowledging that family is involved in this process, the healthcare professional can adequately provide health education to both the person with diabetes and their families. Involving families in health education is crucial as family can influence decision making made by people with diabetes in a proper or improper way. Thus, clinicians need to also skilfully recognise difficulties these people encounter by monitoring their self-management progress and by working closely with them and their family members.

This is the first study conducted in Indonesia that specifically investigates the process of how people with diabetes learn about their disease. The involvement of families in this process is a central finding of the study. Families can enhance the overall health and well-being of the person with diabetes, aid in early recognition of aberration to health status and trigger the initiation of interventions to re-establish homeostasis if they are actively engaged and supported by health professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss conditions for workplace learning (WPL) in relation to temporary agency staffing (TAS), focusing on temporary and regular nurses’ experiences of social relations.

Data were gathered using qualitative semi-structured interviews with five agency nurses and five regular nurses. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.

Similarities and differences regarding conditions for WPL among “temps” and “regulars” emerged, pointing towards both challenges and opportunities for WPL on various levels. Moreover, although challenges stood out, the context of professional work provides certain opportunities for WPL through, for example, knowledge sharing among nurses.

Results are valid for the interviewees’ experiences of WPL conditions. However, the findings may also have currency in other but similar workplaces and employment circumstances.

Client organisations and temporary work agencies could benefit from developing management and HR strategies aimed at strengthening the opportunities for WPL, related to professional work, to ensure that these opportunities are leveraged fully.

This study adopts a WPL perspective on TAS in the context of professional work, which is still rare.

Government-run mental health services in Australia run predominantly on a multidisciplinary team (MDT) model. Literature and observation from practice shows that interprofessional tertiary sector training is absent, ad hoc or not documented, leaving students inadequately prepared for disciplinary differences in opinions and practices. Learning in interprofessional educational settings provides one way of overcoming the difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to describe the outcomes of an interprofessional learning experience targeting final year Australian students enroled in health promotion, registered nursing, enroled nursing, paramedic science, psychology, social work and occupational therapy who are intending to work in mental health teams.

Using a mixed method, pre- and post-test design (four time intervals), with data collected from three scales and open-ended questions, this study measured participant changes in knowledge and attitudes towards interprofessional education and mental health. The study also examined students’ and educators’ perceptions of the value of an interprofessional teaching and learning model.

There was a significant increase in clinical confidence at each time interval, suggesting that the intervention effects were maintained up to three months post-training. Themes about the value of interprofessional learning in mental health were extracted from student data: learning expanded students’ appreciation for difference; this in turn expanded students’ cross-disciplinary communication skills; growing appreciation for diverse world views was seen to be relevant to person-centred mental healthcare; and practice articulating one's own disciplinary views clarified professional identity.

Generalisability of the outcomes beyond the disciplines sampled in this research is limited. MDTs typically include doctors, but we were unable to include medical students because the university did not offer a medical programme. The readiness for participation in a collaborative MDT approach may differ among students groups, disciplines and universities and technical and further educations. There may also be differences not accounted for in these findings between undergraduate students and established healthcare professionals. Further research needs to establish whether the findings are applicable to other student groups and to professionals who already work within MDTs.

These results demonstrate that intensive interprofessional learning experiences in tertiary education can be effective means of increasing students’ awareness of the role of other professionals in MDT.

That social franchising programs induce favorable outcomes is readily taken for granted, albeit lacking robust empirical support. Addressing this situation, this paper takes a closer look at a fractional social franchising program in the public health-care sector in Vietnam to better understand how such programs work. This paper aims to expand the nascent body of empirical research that has examined the inner workings of social franchising programs from the perspective of clients by focusing on the health professionals who work there.

Using an exploratory qualitative research design, the authors conducted 25 semistructured interviews with health professionals of a fractional franchising program called Sisterhood, which introduced reproductive health and family planning services into existing health facilities in Vietnam. Interviews were triangulated with Sisterhood’s internal documents as well as with publicly available reports.

The analysis highlights two pathways through which the social franchising program brought about positive change. On the one hand, the analysis suggests that many of the positive outcomes reported by public health professionals were consistent with the stated goals and measures used by the Sisterhood program, providing evidence that improving the quality of health care for disadvantaged communities can be achieved through careful design and execution. On the other hand, the analysis revealed beneficial outcomes that were outside the scope of the Sisterhood program and, in this sense, “unexpected.” Specifically, the paper sheds light on unintended knowledge spillover effects in which nonfranchised health professionals began to adopt new practices and principles introduced by the social franchising program.

The paper taps into a largely under-researched phenomenon – fractional social franchising – from the perspective of health professionals. Unpacking how the social franchising program created favorable outcomes, some by design and others by accident, the paper opens new empirical and policy insights into how social franchising can improve public health in hard-to-reach communities in the global South. Based on the findings, the authors argue for the intentional promotion and institutionalization of knowledge transfers from franchised to nonfranchised health facilities to reinforce and scale up the positive impact of social franchising. The authors conclude by emphasizing the need for future research to adopt a complexity-sensitive approach that accounts for the dynamic, nonlinear adoption pathways social franchising can take. Such an approach is essential to uncover the beneficial outcomes that can result from social franchising programs but cannot be readily predicted by program design.