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This paper explores the challenging nexus of police custody, risk and intra-organisational boundaries in the context of a recently reformed national police service. Police custody is an often-hidden aspect of policing, away from the public gaze and scrutiny. Although there is increasing recognition of the importance of rural policing (e.g. Harkness (2020); Mawby and Yarwood (2011); Ruddell and Jones (2020); Yarwood and Wooff (2016)), there has been little or no focus on rural police custody. This paper seeks to begin to redress this by focussing on the challenges faced by rural police custody in the context of large-scale organisational change.

This paper draws on data from a study funded by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research (2016–2018), entitled “Measuring Risk and Efficiency in Police Custody in Scotland”. The paper adopts a qualitative methodology to develop an understanding of the varying nature of police custody across Scotland. Two contrasting case study locations were selected, one urban and one rural. 12 semi-structured interviews and 15 hours of observation were carried out. Data was transcribed, coded and analysed and thematic analysis enabled themes to be developed. This paper draws on the data from the rural custody suite.

Drawing on the theoretical framework of Giacomantonio (2014) and more recent considerations of abstract policing Terpstra et al. (2019), this paper offers insights into the ways that police custody in rural Scotland has been organised, against the backdrop of challenging organisational change. I argue that as policing services in Scotland have become increasingly “abstract” from communities, police custody as a national division has witnessed the impact of this more greatly than other parts of local policing. Intra-organisational management around staffing has led to complex management of risk, illustrating some of the challenges of national organisational change on police custody.

This paper focuses on the impact of large scale organisational change on rural police custody and intra-organisational relationships and dynamics. Rural policing is still a largely neglected area of study and rural police custody is even less understood. This paper therefore provides an original contribution by focusing on this under-researched area of policing. It also illustrates complexity around risk, staffing and management of people being held in rural police custody suites. It is therefore of value to policing scholars in other contexts, as well as rural criminology more generally. It has applicability to international contexts where macro level policing reform is occurring.

Effective refractive error (RE) coverage in a resource-constrained country such as Kenya could possibly be achievable if the current dominant commercial entrepreneurship is supplemented with alternative avenues such as social entrepreneurship. This study aims to explore the perceived impact of social enterprises (SEs) in scaling effective RE coverage in Kenya.

This was an exploratory study with data collected from representatives of SEs (n = 29), trainees of SEs (n = 112) and beneficiaries of eye care services provided by SEs (n = 674). Participants were recruited purposively with data collected through telephonic calls. Thematic analysis was carried out by categorizing the codes into categories and themes based on the semantic meaning of the codes.

The perceived impact of SEs from the representative perspective included entrepreneurship and livelihood (n = 3; 10.3%), skills development (n = 20; 69%), technology development (n = 7; 24.1%), access to specialized services (n = 7; 24.1%) and affordability, accessibility and availability of RE services (n = 27; 93.1%). From the perspective of trainees, the themes included economic empowerment (n = 99; 88.4%), improved quality of life (n = 84; 75.0%), sensitizing locals to RE during screening events (n = 112; 100.0%) and enhancing accessibility, availability and affordability (n = 107; 95.5%).

The perceived impact of SEs highlighted in this paper showcases that they are useful for integration into the eye health ecosystem in a resource-constrained country such as Kenya. Integration of SEs into the eye health ecosystem could potentially address the human resource challenge, scale RE service delivery, enhance awareness creation and address the cost barriers to current RE service delivery coverage.