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Research highlights that residential care experienced children and young people in Scotland have poorer educational outcomes than their peers within the wider population. Despite this, poor educational attainment is not inevitable, and further research is needed to increase the understanding of long-term trajectories. This paper aims to address a gap in contemporary literature that is of benefit to practitioners, academics and policymakers. Despite experiencing adversity, attachment, separation and loss, school attainment data on leaving care only reflects part of the educational journey.

Using a mixed methodology and social constructionist theoretical framework, a practitioner-led PhD study gathered data from questionnaires and qualitative information from 13 semi-structured interviews with young people who had experienced residential care in Scotland. Recruitment was through a gatekeeper within a national third-sector organisation. The educational trajectories for young people with experience of residential care in Scotland are complex. A lived experience perspective from a PhD study illustrates that statistical data only captures part of the journey and the author needs to reconsider how success is measured.

Of the 13 participants in the study, 12 achieved success educationally, although for the majority of those interviewed, attainment continued after leaving compulsory education. Barriers to greater success included placement uncertainty and movement, stigma, low expectations, pressure to not become a statistic, procedural obstacles and inconsistency or poor relationships.

Supportive relationships and stable placements can create circumstances conducive to effective learning, but evidence reflects that support is necessary throughout the life course if children, young people and adults with care experience are to reach their full academic potential.

Research into the educational outcomes for those with experience of residential care in Scotland is limited. This paper, from a PhD, provides lived experience accounts from a practitioner-led study.

Providing high-quality and cost-efficient care of older people is an important development priority for many health and social care systems in the world. This paper suggests a shift from acute, episodic and reactive hospital-centered care toward longitudinal, person-centered and proactive home-centered care. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge of a comprehensive development strategy for designing and providing home-centered care of older people.

The study design is based on qualitative research with an inductive approach. The authors study development initiatives at the national, regional and local levels of the Swedish health and social care system. The data collection methods included interviews (n = 54), meeting observations (n = 25) and document studies (n = 59).

The authors describe findings related to policy actions and system changes, attempts to achieve collaboration, integration and coordination, new forms of care offerings, characteristics of work settings at home and differences in patients' roles and participation at home and in the hospital.

The authors suggest home-centered care as a solution for providing person-centered and integrated care of older people and give examples of how this can be achieved.

The authors outline five propositions for research and development related to national policies, service modularity as a solution for customized and coordinated care, developing human resources and infrastructure for home settings, expanding services that enable older people living at home and patient co-creation.

A large number of studies indicate that coercive forms of organizational control and performance management in health care services often backfire and initiate dysfunctional consequences. The purpose of this article is to discuss new approaches to performance management in health care services when the purpose is to support innovative changes in the delivery of services.

The article represents cross-boundary work as the theoretical and empirical material used to discuss and reconsider performance management comes from several relevant research disciplines, including systematic reviews of audit and feedback interventions in health care and extant theories of human motivation and organizational control.

An enabling approach to performance management in health care services can potentially contribute to innovative changes. Key design elements to operationalize such an approach are a formative and learning-oriented use of performance measures, an appeal to self- and social-approval mechanisms when providing feedback and support for local goals and action plans that fit specific conditions and challenges.

The article suggests how to operationalize an enabling approach to performance management in health care services. The framework is consistent with new governance and managerial approaches emerging in public sector organizations more generally, supporting a higher degree of professional autonomy and the use of nonfinancial incentives.

Value-based health care (VBHC) argues that health-care needs to re-focus to maximise value creation, defining value as the quota when dividing the outcomes important for the patient, by the cost for health care to deliver such outcomes. This study aims to explore the perception of value among different stakeholders involved in the process of implementing VBHC at a Swedish hospital to support leaders to be more efficient and effective when developing health care.

Participants comprised 19 clinicians and non-clinicians involved in the implementation of VBHC. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and content analysis was performed.

The clinicians described value as a dynamic concept, dependent on the patient and the clinical setting, stating that improving outcomes was more important than containing costs. The value for non-clinicians appeared more driven by the interplay between the outcome and the cost. Non-clinicians related VBHC to a strategic framework for governance or for monitoring different continuous improvement processes, while clinicians appreciated VBHC, as they perceived its introduction as an opportunity to focus more on outcomes for patients and less on cost containment.

There is variation in how clinicians and non-clinicians perceive the key concept of value when implementing VBHC. Clinicians focus on increasing treatment efficacy and improving medical outcomes but have a limited focus on cost and what patients consider most valuable. If the concept of value is defined primarily by clinicians’ own assumptions, there is a clear risk that the foundational premise of VBHC, to understand what outcomes patients value in their specific situation in relation to the cost to produce such outcome, will fail. Health-care leaders need to ensure that patients and the non-clinicians’ perception of value, is integrated with the clinical perception, if VBHC is to deliver on its promise.

This paper aims to explore challenges and opportunities associated with young carers' employment in Australia.

Using a multi-stakeholder approach, this study captures the reflections of stakeholders (n = 8) and young carers (n = 10) about opportunities for, and experiences of, paid employment for young carers.

Despite many organisations internationally increasingly pushing diversity agendas and suggesting a commitment to equal opportunity experiences, this study found that young carers' work opportunities are often disrupted by their caring role. For young carers to be successful in their careers, organisations need to provide further workplace flexibility, and other support is required to attract and retain young carers into organisations and harness their transferrable skills for meaningful careers.

The paper highlights important implications for human resource management practitioners given the need to maximise the participation of young carers as workers, with benefits for young carers themselves, employers and society.

The research adds to the human resource management and work–family conflict literature in examining young carers through drawing on Conservation of Resources theory to highlight resources invested in caring leads to loss of educational and work experience resources. This leads to loss cycles and spirals, which can potentially continue across a lifetime, further contributing to disadvantage and lack of workplace and societal inclusion for this group of young people.

As populations are ageing and the global average life expectancy is rising, the provision of care for older people is an increasingly salient issue. This paper aims to focus on family-provided care for older immigrants, examining how older immigrants and care providers experience and construct family caregiving.

Based on interviews with care recipients, family care providers, municipal staff and representatives for migrant organisations in Sweden, this study presents a typology of family caregiving for older immigrants.

The authors found three caregiving types, namely, solely family-provided care and a combination of family care and public care (predominantly one or the other). The decision to select family-provided or publicly-funded care depends on personal and institutional factors.

The paper makes three empirical contributions to the literature on care provision for older immigrants. Firstly, this study provides insights into the structural and personal factors that shape care-giving arrangements for older immigrants. Secondly, this study examines the perspectives of care recipients and care providers on family-provided care. Care expectations differ between both groups and sometimes result in intergenerational disagreement. Thirdly, in terms of institutional support, this study finds that the Swedish state’s notion of individual needs does not match the needs of immigrant elderly and their caregivers. The paper places the care types in a broader discussion about eldercare provision in the Swedish welfare state, which has experienced a decline in publicly funded care services and an increase in family caregiving in the past 30 years. In addition, it addresses questions of dignified ageing from a minority perspective.

This study aims to observe and discuss an emerging disintermediation in transportation, finance and health care, and explain how these three key areas depend on intermediary institutions that are the fruit of modern corporate governance conditions that find their roots in classical sociological theory.

The authors review and incorporate a diversity of research literature to explain the likelihood for the development and continuation of disintermediation.

The authors map two sociological perspectives (Emile Durkheim’s theory of interdependence and Herbert Spencer’s theory of contracts) to two modern corporate governance theories (resource dependence theory and agency theory). The authors then discuss the challenging social situation resulting from modern corporate governance and show how these conditions create the potential for a continuum of disintermediation across the specific and crucial economic sectors of transportation, finance and health care.

The implications of this theoretical integration can help organizational leaders navigate complex social and strategic issues and prepare for the consequences that may result from the emerging disintermediation.

The complexity and uncertainty of healthcare operations increasingly require agility to safeguard a high quality of care. Using a microfoundations of dynamic capabilities perspective, this study investigates the effects of nurses' implicit voice theories (IVTs) on the behaviors that influence their individual agility.

This research uses quantitative survey data collected from 2,552 Canadian nurses during the fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the fall of 2021. Structural equation modeling is used to test a conceptual model that hypothesizes the effects of three different IVTs on nurses' creativity, spontaneity, agility and the quality of care they deliver to patients.

The results reveal that voice-inhibiting cognitions (like “suggestions are criticisms for higher-ups”, “I first need a solution or solid data”, and “speaking up has negative repercussions”) negatively impact nurses' creativity and spontaneity in crafting solutions to problems they face daily. In turn, this affects nurses' individual agility as they attempt to adapt to changing circumstances and, ultimately, the quality of care they provide to their patients.

Even if organizations have little control over employees' pre-held beliefs regarding voice, they can still reverse them by developing and nurturing a voice-welcoming culture to boost their workers' agility.

This study combines two theoretical frameworks, voice theory and dynamic capabilities theory, to study how individual-level factors (cognitions and behaviors) contribute to nurses' individual agility and the quality of care they provide to their patients. It answers the recent calls of scholars to study the mechanisms through which healthcare operations can develop and sustain dynamic capabilities, such as agility, and better face the “new normal”.

While digital transformation holds immense promise, organizations often fail to realize its benefits. This study aims to address how policies for digital transformation benefits realization are translated into practice.

The authors apply a qualitative, comparative case study of two large, public-sector health care organizations in Sweden. Through document and interview data, the authors analyze the process of translation.

The study finds that practice variation is primarily caused by two types of decoupling: policy-practice and means-ends. Contrary to previous studies, coercion in policy compliance is not found to decrease practice variation.

The limitations primarily stem from the empirical selection of two large public health-care organizations in Sweden, affecting the study’s generalizability. Reducing practice variation is more effectively achieved through goal alignment than coercion, leading to implications for the design of governance and control.

Policymakers should, instead of focusing on control-related compliance, work to align organizational objectives and policies to decrease practice variation for successful benefits realization.

The study contributes to better benefits realization of digital transformation initiatives in health care. As such, the authors contribute to a better functioning and more transformative health care in times of increased demand and decreased supply of health-care services.

The study challenges conventional wisdom by identifying that coercion is less effective than goal alignment in reducing practice variation, thereby enhancing the understanding of policy implementation dynamics in health-care settings.