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Participation is the active involvement of children and young people in decision-making regarding issues that affect their lives. It is crucial in the context of child protection and welfare systems and how they respond to the needs of children and young people. The purpose of this paper is to report on the evaluation of child and family participation in an early intervention and prevention programme implemented by the Irish Child and Family Agency. It provides an analysis of a comprehensive, “whole organization” approach to understand how participation is embedded in policy and practice.

This paper reports on a comparative qualitative case study of the perspectives of managers and practitioners about participation practice, identifying the facilitators and barriers, as well as their perspectives of the sustainability of participation within the agency and its partners. The authors draw on two complementary, theoretically informed studies evaluating participatory practice within the Agency using qualitative interviews with participants.

Overall, managers and practitioners had a positive attitude towards participation and identified examples of best practices. Facilitators included training, access to resources and the quality of relationships. Challenges for meaningful participation remain, such as the need to engage, hard to reach populations. Differences were identified regarding how embedded and sustainable participation was.

This paper provides a critical understanding of participation in practice and how to embed a culture of participation in child protection and welfare.

Reports on a study looking at dimensions of service provider performance that influence immediate emotional responses to service encounters, based on 914 service encounters. Identifies five service‐provider dimensions that are significant predictors of emotional response to services. Finds that different service‐provider dimensions influence positive as compared with negative emotional responses and that temporal duration and spatial intimacy of the encounter affect both the reported levels and relative importance of these service‐provider dimensions to emotional responses.

This study aims to compare public and private hospitals based on both cognitive and affective components of patients’ satisfaction.

A survey of 770 Italian patients from public and private hospitals was conducted. Then, hierarchical and non-hierarchical cluster analyses and a series of chi-squared tests were run with the aim of segmenting patients’ emotional response.

Respondents show different levels of satisfaction and a different emotional status based on the private or public nature of the service provider. The cluster analysis helped to identify two segments. Specifically, the cluster with the highest positive emotions is reported to have a higher level of satisfaction and a higher intention to return; this evidence is much stronger when a private service provider rather than a public one is considered. A series of chi-squared tests reveal that no significant differences exist among clusters based on socio-demographic characteristics.

This study uses a convenience sample and is highly context specific, and thus the authors are unable to make generalizations.

Hospital managers should develop a customer-oriented approach, for example, by paying greater attention to patients’ emotions and experience, via conducting systematic surveys on patients’ emotions and improving the servicescape.

The main contribution of this study resides in simultaneously considering the role of cognitive and affective components on patients’ satisfaction and behavioural intention, and segmenting patients based on their emotional responses. Moreover, only few studies provide a comparison of public and private hospitals in Italy.