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The aim of this study was to explore and understand the leadership experiences of medical consultants prior to a major hospital move. Health and care is becoming increasingly complex and there is no greater challenge than the move to a new hospital. Effective leadership has been identified as being essential for successful transition. However, there is very little evidence of how medical consultants experience effective leadership.

A qualitative methodology was utilized with one-to-one semi-structured interviews conducted with ten medical consultants. These were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. The research complied with the consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research (COREQ).

Four themes were found to influence medical consultants’ experience of leadership: collaboration, patient centredness, governance and knowledge mobilization. Various factors were identified that negatively influenced their leadership effectiveness. The findings suggest that there are a number of factors that influence complexity leadership effectiveness. Addressing these areas may enhance leadership effectiveness and the experience of leadership in medical consultants.

This study provides a rich exploration of medical consultants’ experience of collective leadership prior to a transition to a new hospital and provides new understandings of the way collective leadership is experienced in the lead up to a major transition and makes recommendations for future leadership research and practice.

The findings suggest that there are a number of factors that influence complexity leadership effectiveness. Addressing these areas may enhance leadership effectiveness and the experience of leadership in medical consultants.

Clinical leadership is associated with better outcomes for patients therefore any interventions that enhance leadership capability will improve outcomes for patients and therefore benefit society.

This is the first research to explore medical consultants’ experience of collective leadership prior to a transition to a new hospital.

Carrying out minor surgery procedures in the primary care setting is popular with patients, cost effective and delivers at least as good outcomes as those performed in the hospital setting. This paper aims to describe the central role of clinical leadership in developing an accreditation system for general practitioners (GPs) undertaking community-based surgery in the Irish national setting where no mandatory accreditation process currently exists.

In all, 24 GPs were recruited to the GP network. Ten pilot standards were developed addressing GPs’ experience and training, clinical activity and practice supporting infrastructure and tested, using information and document review, prospective collection of clinical data and a practice inspection visit. Two additional components were incorporated into the project (patient satisfaction survey and self-audit). A multi-modal evaluation was undertaken. A majority of GPs was included at all stages of the project, in line with the principles of action learning. The steering group had a majority of GPs with relevant expertise and representation of all other actors in the minor surgery arena. The GP research network contributed to each stage of the project. The project lead was a GP with minor surgery experience. Quantitative data collected were analysed using Predictive Analytic SoftWare. Krueger’s framework analysis approach was used to analyse the qualitative data.

A total of 9 GPs achieved all standards at initial review, 14 successfully completed corrective actions and 1 GP did not achieve the required standard. Standards were then amended to reflect findings and a supporting framework was developed.

The flexibility of the action-learning approach and the clinical leadership design allowed for the development of robust quality standards in a short timeframe.

We take an affect-based approach to theoretically introduce and explore the knowing-doing gap of leadership. We focus on the emotion of fear that managers may experience in the workplace, and how it may influence the transfer of their leadership knowledge into leadership action.

We use Affective Events Theory as our underlying theoretical lens, drawing on emotional, cognitive, and behavioral mechanisms to explain the role of fear in the widening and bridging of the knowing-doing gap of leadership.

We theoretically explore the interplay between leader fear, the leadership contexts, and the knowing-doing gap of leadership. From this, we develop a multidimensional theoretical framework on the influence of leader fear on the knowing-doing gap of leadership.

We highlight how fear and the knowing-doing gap of leadership may be influenced by and potentially impact on individual managers and their leadership contexts.

Our initial theoretical framework provides a starting point for understanding fear and the knowing-doing gap of leadership. It has implications for future research to enhance our understanding of the topic, and contributes toward existing approaches on leadership development as well as emotions and leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a national, comprehensive quality indicator set to support delivering high-quality clinical care in Irish general practice.

Potential general practice quality indicators were identified through a literature review. A modified two-stage Delphi process was used to rationalise international indicators into an indicator set, involving both experts from key stakeholder groups (general practitioners (GPs), practice nurses, practice managers, patient and health policy representatives) and predominantly randomly selected GPs. An illustrative evaluation approach was used to road test the indicator set and supporting materials.

In total, 80 panellists completed the two Delphi rounds and staff in 13 volunteer practices participated in the road test. The original 171 indicators was reduced to 147 during the Delphi process and further reduced to 68 indicators during the road test. The indicators were set out in 14 sub-domains across three areas (practice infrastructure, practice processes and procedures, and practice staff). Practice staff planned 77 quality improvement activities after their assessment against the indicators and 31 (40 per cent) were completed with 44 (57 per cent) ongoing and two (3 per cent) not advanced after a six-month road test. A General Practice Indicators of Quality indicator set and support materials were produced at the conclusion.

It is important and relatively easy to customise existing quality indicators to a particular setting. The development process can be used to raise awareness, build capacity and drive quality improvement activity in general practices.

The authors describe in detail a method to develop general practice quality indicators for a regional or national population from existing validated indicators using consensus, action research and an illuminative evaluation.

Health apps offer a potential approach to support healthier food behaviours but a lack of sufficient engagement may limit effectiveness. This study aims to use a user engagement theoretical lens to examine the factors that influence app engagement over time and may prompt disengagement.

A phenomenological exploration of the lived experience was used. Women from a lower socioeconomic background (based on the occupation and employment status of the household’s primary income earner) were randomly assigned to use one of two apps for a minimum of eight weeks. Multiple data collection methods, including accompanied shops, researcher observations, interviews, participant reflective accounts and questionnaires, were used at different time-points to examine engagement. Theoretical thematic analysis was conducted to explore the engagement experience and relevant social, personal and environmental influences.

Healthy food involvement appears to drive app engagement. Changes in situational involvement may contribute to fluctuation in engagement intensity over time as the saliency of personal goals change. Negatively valenced engagement dimensions may contribute to the overall expression of engagement. A lack of congruency with personal goals or an imbalance between perceived personal investment and value was expressed as the primary reasons for disengagement.

Situational involvement may act as a trigger of different engagement phases. There is a need to better distinguish between enduring and situational involvement in engagement research.

Individual characteristics may shape engagement and propensity for disengagement, which highlights the practical importance of incorporating tailored features into app design.

Findings broaden the current conceptualisation of engagement within the digital space and prompt a reconsideration of the role of situational involvement and negatively valenced dimensions throughout the engagement process.

There is an urgent need for teacher preparation programs to equip teachers to teach in innovative and transformative ways, meeting the needs of diverse learners. Coaching is an instrumental tool for supporting change and development, especially in contexts with decentralized teacher preparation guidelines.

This multicase study examines cross-institutional programmatic innovations for coaching teacher candidates (TCs) and centering equity using improvement science and equity coaching. The authors explore the networked improvement community’s (NIC’s) examination of problems of practice through plan–do–study–act cycles in three coaching contexts within and across seven institutions.

Qualitative methods revealed that adapting coaching protocols can center equity and build equity-focused practices. This work highlights revisions to coaching within and across teacher preparation programs (TPPs), which the authors hope inspires extending equity-centered coaching and improvement science to new contexts. This cross-case analysis revealed program innovations for coaches, digital technologies and alignment.

This study addresses ongoing challenges faced by TPPs in the United States, including TCs' understandings of equity in teaching and decentralized teacher preparation that results in varied and incongruent understandings about quality teaching. This study builds on previous scholarship that examines shifts in coaching practices by disrupting silos in TPPs as examined innovations.

The paper offers a unique view of cross-institutional collaboration in coaching to improve transformative teaching experiences in teacher preparation field experiences.

Professional careers have become more precarious in recent decades. Corporations today engage in downsizing even during profitable times, a practice that impacts workers throughout the labor force, including those with advanced degrees. Using a case study of women geoscientists in the oil and gas industry, I investigate how the increasing precariousness of professional careers reinforces gender inequality. The compressed cycle of booms and busts in the oil and gas industry permits an investigation into how women fare in precarious professional jobs. Extending gendered organization theory, I argue that three mechanisms are built into professional careers today that enhance women’s vulnerability to layoffs: teamwork, career maps, and networking. I illustrate how these mechanisms disadvantage women with in-depth portraits of three geoscientists who lost their jobs during the recent downturn in oil prices. Their personal narratives, collected over a 3-year period of boom and bust, reveal how a particular multinational corporation is structured in ways that favor the white men who dominate their industry. The rhetoric of diversity obscures the workings of gendered organizations during good times, but when times get tough, management’s decisions about whom to lay off belies the routine practices the reproduce men’s advantages within the industry.

The purpose of this paper is to question the idea of “passing a test” within activist ethnography. Activist ethnography is an ethnographic engagement with social movement organizations as anti-authoritarian, anarchist, feminist and/or anti-racist collectives. It is based on the personal situating of the researcher within the field to avoid a replication of colonialist research dynamics. Addressing these concerns, we explore activist ethnography through feminist standpoint epistemologies and decolonial perspectives.

This paper draws on our two activist ethnographies conducted as PhD research in two distinct European cities with two different starting points. While Léa entered the field through her PhD research, Claire partly withdrew and re-entered as academic.

Even when activist researchers share the political positioning of the social movement they want to study, they still experience tests regarding their research methodology. As activists, they are accountable to their movement and experience – as most other activist – a constant threat of exclusion. In addition, activist networks are fractured along political lines, the test is therefore ongoing.

Our contribution is threefold. First, the understanding of tests within activist ethnography helps decolonizing ethnography. Being both the knower and the known, activist ethnographers reflect on the colonial and heterosexist history of ethnography which offers potentials to use ethnography in non-exploitative ways. Second, we conceive of activist ethnography as a prefigurative methodology, i.e. as an embedded activist practice, that should therefore answer to the same tests as any other practice of prefigurative movements: it should aim to enact here and now the type of society the movement reaches for. Finally, we argue that activist ethnography relies on and contribute to developing consciousness about the researcher’s political subjectivity.