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The purpose of this paper is to explore how temporarily vulnerable customers and their bank advisors cope with incidents that occur over the course of their service relationships.

A qualitative design based on ten case studies, involving interviews with both sides of the dyad (client–bank advisor) and internal secondary data from the bank, was conducted.

The findings show that the two sides of the dyad span a gradation of coping strategies that are enacted to solve the incidents encountered. Thus, temporarily vulnerable consumers turn out to be non-passive in their asymmetrical relationship with advisors and deploy residual resources to co-create solutions.

The results enrich the knowledge of consumers’ vulnerability insofar as the authors extend the transformative service literature to temporarily vulnerable clients who project themselves beyond the crisis period and consider ensuring satisfactory levels of their well-being.

The findings suggest that banks can refine their categorization of vulnerable clients by identifying those that remain profitable and for which an effort is worth making, and those in whom it is appropriate to disinvest. They also prompt banks to design supports for the advisors in managing increased stressful interactions with precarious customers.

To prevent the risk of slippage by or exclusion of, vulnerable customers who experience serious banking incidents, the paper points out the necessity to mobilize alternative levers from the public and associative spheres to allow these customers access to a minimum of banking services.

As an early exploration of transient vulnerable clients, this research fuels the understanding of their capacity to consider co-creating, alongside bank advisors, solutions to the incidents encountered with a view to preserving their well-being and ensuring their social and economic inclusion.

This study investigated pre-evacuation times and evacuation behaviors of vulnerable people during the 2018 flooding in Shimobara, Okayama, Japan, and the flood-triggered factory explosion, a natural hazard-triggered technological accident known as a natural-hazard-triggered technological accidents (Natech). This study examined factors that affected evacuation decisions and pre-evacuation time, estimated the evacuation time in case of no explosion and identified community disaster prevention organization response efforts for vulnerable people.

Interviews with all 18 vulnerable people who experienced the event were conducted. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the effect of six factors on evacuation time and reasons for delayed evacuation.

Factors affecting evacuation decisions included the sound of the explosion, followed by recommendations from relatives and the community disaster prevention organization. Explosion-related injuries delayed early evacuation, but experience of previous disasters and damage had a positive effect on early evacuation. The explosion sound accelerated evacuation of non-injured people; however, explosion-related injuries significantly delayed evacuation of injured individuals. The Shimobara community disaster prevention organization’s disaster response included a vulnerable people registry, visits to all local households and a multilayered approach that enabled monitoring of all households.

This is the first study to examine the evacuation behavior of vulnerable people and community responses during a Natech event.

This paper studies a concept for protecting vulnerable population groups during pandemics using direct home deliveries of essential supplies, from a distribution logistics perspective. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate feasible and resource-efficient home delivery strategies, including collaboration between retailers and logistics service providers based on a practical application.

A food home delivery concept in urban areas during pandemics is mathematically modeled. All seniors living in a district of Berlin, Germany, represent the vulnerable population supplied by a grocery distribution center. A capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is developed in combination with a k-means clustering algorithm. To manage this large-scale problem efficiently, mixed-integer programming (MIP) is used. The impact of collaboration and additional delivery scenarios is examined with a sensitivity analysis.

Roughly 45 medically vulnerable persons can be served by one delivery vehicle in the baseline scenario. Operational measures allow a drastic decrease in required resources by reducing service quality. In this way, home delivery for the vulnerable population of Berlin can be achieved. This requires collaboration between grocery and parcel services and public authorities as well as overcoming accompanying challenges.

Developing a home delivery concept for providing essential goods to urban vulnerable groups during pandemics creates a special value. Setting a large-scale CVRP with variable fleet size in combination with a clustering algorithm contributes to the originality.

The aim of this paper is to explore the affective and cognitive factors that condition banking relationships for economically vulnerable consumers and how these factors contribute to increasing financial difficulties and exclusion. This research, performed on a set of focus groups, bases its findings on a combination of experimental and discourse analysis methods.

Financial decisions are not rational and can be biased by affective and cognitive factors. Behavioural finance has focused very little on analysing how consumer biases influence relationships with banking institutions. Additionally, these relationships are affected by the digitalization and transformation of banking business. Thus, in the case of economically vulnerable consumers, who are not profitable for the increasingly competitive banking industry and lack financial abilities, their risk of financial exclusion is increasing.

The results show that distrust and shame lead to financial difficulties in economically vulnerable consumers. Distrust generates problems of access and self-exclusion, while shame generates difficulties of use. This lack of trust makes them more rational when dealing with machines than with people, showing greater banking difficulties for consumers with a “person-suspicious” profile.

This finding can help regulators establish limits on banking behaviour, require banks to incorporate affective and cognitive factors in their convenience tests and detect new variables that can help them improve their insolvency ratios and reputations.

This review of the decision‐making literature aims to challenge the rational model of decision‐making upon which the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) 2005 is premised.

The paper forms part of a larger study commissioned by the Office of the Public Guardian looking into complex cases.

The literature supported the study findings that decisions are not made in a linear way and identified the importance of history and memory, motivation and drive, mood and stability, and openness to influence when assessing the mental capacity of vulnerable people, especially in the context of self‐neglect.

This paper will inform workers in health and social care about the emotional factors that influence decision‐making and increase their ability to make nuanced assessments.

Taken together, with other publications from this project, this paper alerts practitioners to situations where vulnerable people are out of their depth; when the role of depression and anxiety may be at least as salient as their understanding of possible consequences and when the past may exert more control over their actions than their understanding of future options.

The paper's added value is that it uses ideas that are current within academic psychology to make explicit some of the factors that lead to complexity when assessing mental capacity under the MCA, especially in the context of self‐neglect.

Using the backdrop of an (apparently) extended visit to the West Indies, analogies with key concerns of internal audit are drawn. An unusual and refreshing way of exploring the main themes ‐ a discussion between Bill and Jack on tour in the islands ‐ forms the debate. Explores the concepts of control, necessary procedures, fraud and corruption, supporting systems, creativity and chaos, and building a corporate control facility.

Using the backdrop of an (apparently) extended visit to the West Indies, analogies with key concerns of internal audit are drawn. An unusual and refreshing way of exploring the main themes ‐ a discussion between Bill and Jack on tour in the islands ‐ forms the debate. Explores the concepts of control, necessary procedures, fraud and corruption, supporting systems, creativity and chaos, and building a corporate control facility.

To achieve a full understanding of the role of marketing from plan to profit requires a knowledge of the basic building blocks. This textbook introduces the key concepts in the art or science of marketing to practising managers. Understanding your customers and consumers, the 4 Ps (Product, Place, Price and Promotion) provides the basic tools for effective marketing. Deploying your resources and informing your managerial decision making is dealt with in Unit VII introducing marketing intelligence, competition, budgeting and organisational issues. The logical conclusion of this effort is achieving sales and the particular techniques involved are explored in the final section.

The purpose of this paper is to look at safeguarding documentation in relation to 50 adult safeguarding files for the period April 2010 to March 2011. This was followed up with semi-structured interviews with a small number of Designated Officers whose role it is to screen referrals and coordinate investigations. Findings from the research were used to redesign regional adult safeguarding documentation to ensure Designated Officers have access to the information necessary to assist them in reaching decisions. Designated and Investigating Officer training was also updated to reflect learning from the research thereby reducing the potential for variation in practice.

A file tool was developed which examined the recorded information in safeguarding documentation contained within 50 service user files. The review tool looked at the personal characteristics of the vulnerable adult, the nature of the alleged abuse and the decisions/outcomes reached by staff acting as safeguarding Designated Officers. A semi-structured interview schedule asked Designated Offices to comment on the training and understanding of the process as well as the factors they believed were central to the decision making process. Their responses were compared to data obtained from the file review.

A key finding in the research was that while factors such as type of abuse, the vulnerable adults’ consent to cooperate with proceedings, identity of the referrer, etc. did influence decisions taken there was a lack of clarity on the part of Designated Officers in relation to their roles and responsibilities and of the process to be followed.

The research was limited to one Health & Social Care Trust area and had a small sample size (n=50).

The findings of the research led to a revamping of existing safeguarding documentation which had failed to keep pace with developments and was no longer fit for purpose. Adult safeguarding training courses within the Trust were redesigned to bring greater focus to the role and responsibilities of designated and Investigating Officers and the stages in the safeguarding process. Adult Safeguarding leads were established within programmes of care and professional support mechanisms put in place for staff engaged in this area of work.

Better trained and supported staff alongside more efficient safeguarding systems should lead to better outcomes in the protection of vulnerable people from abuse and harm.

The research built on existing albeit limited research into what potentially influences staff involved in critical decision-making processes within adult safeguarding.

This paper has been developed from discussions between the police and adult social care staff in adult protection training on joint investigations for managers and practitioners in Somerset. The role of the police in criminal investigations is examined and reviewed in the context of wider adult protection investigations. The case studies and discussion points are based on experience from adult protection investigations conducted by the East Somerset Public Protection Unit, and are used to identify key considerations for the effective planning, conduct and co‐ordination of adult protection investigations.