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Positive organizational scholarship in healthcare (POSH) suggests that, to promote widespread improvement within health services, focusing on the good, the excellent, and the brilliant is as important as conventional approaches that focus on the negative, the problems, and the failures. POSH offers different opportunities to learn from and build resilient cultures of safety, innovation, and change. It is not separate from tried and tested approaches to health service improvement – but rather, it approaches this improvement differently. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

POSH, appreciative inquiry (AI) and reflective practice were used to inform an exploratory investigation of what is good, excellent, or brilliant health service management.

The researchers identified new characteristics of good healthcare and what it might take to have brilliant health service management, elucidated and refined POSH, and identified research opportunities that hold potential value for consumers, practitioners, and policymakers.

The secondary data used in this study offered limited contextual information.

This approach is a platform from which to: identify, investigate, and learn about brilliant health service management; and inform theory and practice.

POSH can help to reveal what consumers and practitioners value about health services and how they prefer to engage with these services.

Using POSH, this paper examines what consumers and practitioners value about health services; it also illustrates how brilliance can be theorized into health service management research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to call for strong medical co-leadership in transforming the Australian health system. The paper discusses how Health LEADS Australia, the Australian health leadership framework, offers an opportunity to engage medical clinicians and doctors in the leadership of health services.

The paper first discusses the nature of medical leadership and its associated challenges. The paper argues that medical leaders have a key role in the design, implementation and evaluation of healthcare reforms, and in translating these reforms for their colleagues. Second, this paper describes the origins and nature of Health LEADS Australia. Third, this paper discusses the importance of the goal of Health LEADS Australia and suggests the evidence-base underpinning the five foci in shaping medical leadership education and professional development. This paper concludes with suggestions on how Health LEADS Australia might be evaluated.

For the well-being of the Australian health system, doctors need to play an important role in the kind of leadership that makes measurable differences in the retention of clinical professions; improves organisational cultures; enhances the engagement of consumers and their careers; is associated with better patient and public health outcomes; effectively addresses health inequalities; balances cost effectiveness with improved quality and safety; and is sustainable.

This is the first article addressing Health LEADS Australia and medical leadership. Australia is actively engaging in a national approach to health leadership. Discussions about the mechanisms and intentions of this are valuable in both national and global health leadership discourses.

Problem alcohol use (PAU) is common and associated with considerable adverse outcomes among patients receiving opioid agonist treatment (OAT). The purpose of this paper is to describe a qualitative feasibility assessment of a primary care-based complex intervention to promote screening and brief intervention for PAU, which also aims to examine acceptability and potential effectiveness.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 patients and eight general practitioners (GPs) who had been purposively sampled from practices that had participated in the feasibility study. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically.

Six key themes were identified. While all GPs found the intervention informative and feasible, most considered it challenging to incorporate into practice. Barriers included time constraints, and overlooking and underestimating PAU among this cohort of patients. However, the intervention was considered potentially deliverable and acceptable in practice. Patients reported that (in the absence of the intervention) their use of alcohol was rarely discussed with their GP, and were reticent to initiate conversations on their alcohol use for fear of having their methadone dose reduced.

Although a complex intervention to enhance alcohol screening and brief intervention among primary care patients attending for OAT is likely to be feasible and acceptable, time constraints and patients’ reticence to discuss alcohol as well as GPs underestimating patients’ alcohol problems is a barrier to consistent, regular and accurate screening by GPs. Future research by way of a definitive efficacy trial informed by the findings of this study and the Psychosocial INTerventions for Alcohol quantitative data is a priority.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first qualitative study to examine the capability of primary care to address PAU among patients receiving OAT.

This chapter will consider curriculum making in lower secondary education in Ireland. Building on the concept of curriculum as a social practice involving multiple actors across different contexts and involving intersecting domains of influence from the supra, to the nano, we characterizethe landscape of lower secondary education in Ireland as an “assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2003). An assemblage is any number of elements that are engaged in a process of arranging, organising, fitting together and a process of knowledge making. We discuss the emerging properties that have begun to evolve through the inter-connections of the assemblage as they engage in the process of reform by structuring the findings through the lens of how the semiotic, material and social flows worked simultaneously to open up or close down the process. Curriculum ideology, concepts, language and communication are examples of the semiotic flow. The material flow is the content of the domains, such as the actors, the physical structures, documents and artefacts. Relationships, pedagogy, and collaborative practice are involved in the social flow of the assemblage. The research underpinning this chapter mapped the agency of the actors in their capacity to make curriculum as these three flows worked simultaneously during a process of assemblage wide curriculum reform of lower secondary education in Ireland. The analysis and discussion gives rise to a number of insights into processes of curriculum making and into the complexities of system-wide reform.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the development of a recovery-oriented training programme for mental health care-givers. It also considers the effectiveness of using participatory research methods that promote involvement of people with diverse expertise to co-produce this programme. It presents a rationale for developing recovery-oriented training, which employs blended learning, comprising face-to-face and e-learning.

A small advisory group consisting of professionals, experts-by-experience (service users) and -by-caring (care-givers) and an academic developed a blended learning programme about the recovery approach for mental health carer-givers. This paper details the participatory approach supported by an action research cycle that contributed to the design of the programme, and the specific impact of experiential knowledge on its development.

Reflections on the advisory group process are described that led to the co-production of the course. This leads to consideration of the value of using this research approach to develop a carer-focused programme. The content of the recovery-oriented training programme is presented which adopts blended learning. This leads to discussion of potential of this format to improve carers’ access to training.

It is proposed that this recovery-oriented course, building on a previous study, has the potential to positively influence outcomes for the training programme participants (the care-givers) and the person they support. It is suggested that blended learning may in part overcome some of the barriers carers experience to accessing and participating in traditional interventions. Reflections on the process of co-production underline the value of participatory research in designing this recovery-oriented course for carers.

BCMSV is a computer database of information about individual items of seventeenth and eighteenth‐century manuscript English verse in the Brotherton Collection of Leeds University Library. Its recent worldwide availability via the Internet provides an opportunity to describe the purpose and nature of the project, to outline the database record structure, and to give examples of current search techniques (with illustrative examples). Concludes with an examination of one of the manuscripts indexed in BCMSV, Brotherton Collection MS Lt 11, which was compiled apparently in a Yorkshire household at different dates from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Shows that analysis of the manuscript (which predominantly contains anonymous satires) is now greatly facilitated by its inclusion in BCMSV. Reproduces a manuscript page containing one of three “satires upon the Wakefield ladies”.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some health‐related effects of creative and expressive writing.

Reviews some of the main research studies exploring links between expressive writing and aspects of health, including two new experimental studies showing effects of poetry on mood and immune system indices.

Research studies have involved standard writing tasks and have shown a good range of physiological and behavioural benefits. Example findings include improvements in health and well‐being and enhanced levels of host defences in immune system functioning. Other notable findings include reduced severity of symptoms in arthritis and asthma sufferers. However, writing disclosure may also have negative effects on clients with post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The cognitive‐behavioural bases of “writing therapy” include the informative function of emotions, self‐regulation, re‐framing, and dealing more effectively with negative feelings.

Provides health professionals with an overview of research into health‐related effects of creative and expressive writing, and may encourage sensitive approaches which include writing therapy. The studies of poetry and immune function report some of the first empirical biological evidence for the poetry‐health link.

This paper aims to conduct a comparative study by examining the Audit Committee (AC) set-up, roles, responsibilities and developments in two distinct English public sector settings, namely, foundation trusts (FTs) and local authorities (LAs).

The paper is exploratory and explanatory in nature and uses a qualitative case study approach framed in institutional theory. It is based on semi-structured interviews with AC chairs, external and internal auditors and finance directors triangulated with meeting observations and documentation review.

The study finds that public sector ACs have a large and diverse role which extends beyond challenging/monitoring responsibilities. Influenced by the New Public Management ideology, the AC has developed more rapidly in FTs due to imposed regulation contrasting with the slower progress in LAs due to its still voluntary adoption. Nevertheless, in both environments, there is a developing understanding and growing competence within the AC in terms of their assurance role where the focus has shifted from an emphasis on function and on transacting business through following a manual, to a more strategic-looking approach.

Due to the complexity of public sector settings, and by using an approach framed within institutional theory, the study contributes by challenging a simple notion of isomorphism as an explanation of AC roles, responsibilities and development in two distinct public sector environments. Furthermore, the study recognizes that there is a need to ensure ACs are appropriate to their institutional setting and organizational context.

Most AC studies have focused on private sector contexts. This paper explores the phenomenon in a different organizational context, namely, as a public sector comparative case study.