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The purpose of this study is to explore public health employees' experiences of participating in a commercial weight management programme supported by their employers over a 12-week period.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 employees who had participated in the programme (group-based or online).

The main motivators for enquiring about and attending the programme were: the offer to attend the programme free of charge, the opportunity to kick start their weight loss efforts, to take part in an academic research study and the opportunity for “shared experiences” with their colleagues.

This study did not allow us to explore the reasons why some employees opted not to take up the opportunity for weight management support through their workplace. Further qualitative research with non-engagers would allow us to inquire about why employees might not engage with WM support and offer alternative strategies.

Employers should facilitate their employees' efforts to lead a healthier lifestyle in the long-term creating employer health and safety policies that actively encourage healthy living and weight management. Improving employee health can contribute to increasing productivity, reducing stress and absenteeism.

This paper presents a novel approach to facilitating employees' weight management. Employees perceived their employer-supported participation in a commercial weight management programme outside of their work setting as a positive experience that assisted their weight management efforts suggesting the acceptability and feasibility of this approach to addressing weight in the workplace.

Background: The prevalence of obesity in English adults and children has reached critical levels. Obesity is determined by a wide range of factors including the environment and actions to reduce obesity prevalence requires a whole systems approach. The spatial planning system empowers local authorities to manage land use and development decisions to tackle obesogenic environments.

Methods: This research aimed to better understand what and how planning powers are being utilised by local authorities to help tackle population obesity. It reviewed literature on the six planning healthy weight environments themes. It identified what powers exist within the planning system to address these themes. It collated professionals’ perspectives on the barriers and opportunities through focus groups within local authorities and semi-structured interviews with national stakeholders.

Results: The research complements current research on the association between the environment and obesity outcomes, though methods employed by researchers in the literature were inconsistent. It identified three categories of planning powers available to both require and encourage those with responsibilities for and involvement in planning healthy weight environments. Through direct engagement with practitioners, it highlighted challenges in promoting healthy weight environments, including wider systems barriers such as conflicting policy priorities, lack of policy prescription and alignment at local levels, and impact from reduced professional and institutional capacity in local government.

Conclusions: The conclusions support a small but increasing body of research which suggests that policy makers need to ensure barriers are removed before planning powers can be effectively used to promote healthy weight environments as part of a whole systems approach. The research is timely with continuing policy and guidance focus on tackling obesity prevalence from national government departments and their agencies. This research was conducted as part of a Master of Research at Leeds Beckett University associated with a national whole-systems to obesity programme.

This chapter investigates how integrated reporting (IR) can contribute to a better corporate social responsibility (CSR) implementation through diffusion and adoption of CSR practices and actually applying the CSR discourse. Based on innovation diffusion theory, we intend to analyse the diffusion and adoption of CSR on the grounds of IR. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that IR does indeed represent a mean of reducing the gaps between CSR discourse and its implementation. In order to select the most relevant papers in the area of CSR and IR, we applied the method of positive research. Therefore, the review of literature was made by analysing various theoretical and empirical studies. Setting the main coordinates for CSR and IR through theoretical background, we continue with an empirical analysis on 23 companies that voluntarily publish integrated reports. We intend to demonstrate that IR encourages a diffusion of CSR practices, as companies become more interested in their CSR behaviour.

Health care organizational research should pay greater attention to the specific settings where health is practiced. An ethnographic account of humor, ritual and defiance is presented from 29 months spent in a private, concierge-type radiation oncology center. A thick description of the setting and interaction among center staff and patients is offered in an attempt to establish why qualitative research of health care settings is so important. Findings are compared to Ellingson’s work on health care setting. Humor, ritual and defiance have therapeutic value and deserve greater attention in cancer treatment centers and health care organizations more broadly. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An ethnographic account of humor, ritual and defiance is presented from 29 months spent in a private, concierge-type radiation oncology center through thick description.

This study reinforces the literature on the value of institutionalizing humor and ritual to improve patients’ experience in cancer care given the dominance of large public institutions, most easily accessed by academic researchers. Suncoast Coast Radiation Center’s “institutionalized humor” is an important finding that should be examine further. Scholarship can also illuminate the use of ritual in settings where health care is practiced.

This study is limited to a particular research setting which is a private, concierge care radiation oncology treatment center in the Southeastern USA.

Cancer care centers should consider carefully institutionalizing humor and ritual into their daily practices. Further, patient defiance should be reinterpreted not as a patient deficiency but as a therapeutic coping mechanism by patients.

While nearly half of cancer care in the USA is offered in private, for-profit institutions, the vast majority of the understanding of cancer care comes only from non-profit and government-run institutions. Shining a light of these neglected cancer care settings will add to the understanding and the ability to improve the care offered to patients.

This is the first health ethnography in a concierge care, cancer care treatment setting. It tests the proposition that humor, ritual and defiance play an important role in a private concierge cancer care organization.

‘WORK STUDY specialists of Europe—from both the Six and the Seven— are getting together in London this year regardless of what happens to other meetings,’ said Mr. R. M. Currie, C.B.E., President of the European Work Study Federation, in a statement on the forthcoming Congress of the Federation which is to take place at Church House, Westminster, from May 20 to 23.