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This paper aims to explore the learning needs of general practitioners (GPs) involved in commissioning mental health provision in England, and offer an evaluation of a leadership and commissioning skills development programme for Mental Health Commissioners.

Retrospective mixed method, including online mixed method survey, rating participants’ knowledge, skills, abilities, semi-structured telephone interviews and third-party questionnaires were used. Results were analysed for significant differences using the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test. Open-ended responses and interview transcripts were analysed thematically.

Indicative results showed that participants perceived significant impacts in ability across eight key question groups evaluated. Differences were found between the perceived and observed impact in relation to technical areas covered within the programme which were perceived as the highest scoring impacts by participants.

The indicative results show a positive impact on practice has been both perceived and observed. Findings illustrate the value of this development programme on both the personal development of GP Mental Health Commissioners and commissioning practice. Although the findings of this evaluation increase understanding in relation to an important and topical area, larger scale, prospective evaluations are required. Impact evaluations could be embedded within future programmes to encourage higher participant and third-party engagement. Future evaluations would benefit from collection and analysis of attendance data. Further research could involve patient, service user and carer perspectives on mental health commissioning.

Results of this evaluation could inform the development of future learning programmes for mental health commissioners as part of a national approach to improve mental health provision.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the gap between recovery-oriented processes and clinical outcomes in peer support, an exemplar of recovery-oriented services, and offer suggestions for bridging this gap.

This viewpoint is a brief review of literature on peer support services and gaps in outcome measurement towards building an evidence base for recovery-oriented services.

Clinical outcomes like hospitalizations or symptoms remain a focus of research, practice and policy in recovery-oriented services and contribute to a mixed evidence base for peer support services, in which recovery-oriented outcomes like empowerment, self-efficacy and hopefulness have more evidentiary support. One approach is to identify the theoretical underpinnings of peer support services and the corresponding change mechanisms in models that would make these recovery-oriented outcomes mediators or process outcomes. A better starting point is to consider which outcomes are valued by the people who use services and develop an evaluation approach according to those stated goals. User driven measurement approaches and more participatory types of research can improve both the quality and impact of health and mental health services.

This viewpoint provides a brief review of peer support services and the challenges of outcome measurement in establishing an evidence base and recommends user driven measurement as a starting point in evaluation of recovery-oriented services.

On the occasion of the publication of the 20th volume of the Advances in Gender Research series, this chapter reviews the series goals and previous volumes and introduces the themes and chapters of the current one.

The chapter shows both continuity and change in approaches to theories, research methods, pedagogy, and praxis in gender studies.

Newer approaches, gender-centered, intersectional and global, offer a critique of older ways of gathering and understanding data, ways that respond to and are impacted by social change.

The chapter and the volume are intended to encourage further advances in gender research.

This paper aims to explain how and why the philosophical changes to the pre-registration nursing standards by the UK’s Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) have resulted in a paradigm shift for mental health nursing.

This paper critically examines the changes to nursing education standards and offers an analysis of the problems associated with the shift towards a generic nursing syllabus.

The said shift prioritises physical health intervention, skills, procedures and tasks over the uniqueness of mental health nursing.

This paper argues that mental health nursing skills and qualities such as connection, genuine advocacy and therapeutic-use-of-self have been undervalued and under-represented by the new education standards.

This paper calls on the profession and service users to join the discourse and inform future mental health nursing identity. Ultimately, this paper calls on the NMC to reconsider the underpinning principles of the education standards and allot due consideration to the specific needs of the mental health nursing profession.

During the apartheid era many women, such as Albertina Sisulu and Lilian Ngoyi to name only two, spent time in solitary confinement. Women were punished for taking part in political activities by being issued with banning orders or placed under house arrest. Women placed under banning orders were treated differently to men. At the Special Hearings which were organised by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) women were provided with an opportunity to talk about their experiences as women living under apartheid instead of talking about what had happened to someone in their family. The silencing of women continued even after the new government came to power. This is clearly illustrated in the negligible space allotted to the experiences of women’s oppression and human rights violations in the hearings before the TRC. My concern that an understanding and appreciation of the suffering, oppression, political activism and contribution by South African women during apartheid will be lost to future generations is shared by Annie Coombes’s statement in her book History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (2003).

This paper aims to examine driving retirement and its impact on the well-being of older citizens. The concepts of value creation and destruction are used to understand older consumers’ experiences with the self-service consumption activity of driving. This paper formally introduces the concept of value re-creation, as a means of restoring the overall value lost from the destruction of certain components of previous value structures. In doing so, this paper explores the different ways that resources across the micro, meso and macro levels of the ecosystem can be re-aligned, in order for older citizens to maintain their well-being after driving retirement.

A qualitative, individual-depth interview approach was undertaken with 26 participants living in New South Wales, Australia. The participants comprised of both drivers approaching driving retirement age, as well as driving retirees. Thematic analysis was undertaken to analyse the data.

The findings identified that emotional value in the forms of freedom, independence/autonomy and enjoyment, functional value in the forms of convenience and mobility and community value are created from driving. Driving retirement destroys certain components of this value (e.g. enjoyment and convenience) irrevocably, however freedom, independence/autonomy, mobility and social connectedness can still be maintained through re-aligning resources across the micro, meso and macro levels of the ecosystem. New components of value are also created from driving retirement. These include peace of mind, which contributes to the re-creation of the emotional value dimension, and cost savings, which creates the new value dimension of economic value. These changes to the value structure effectively re-create the overall value obtained by individuals when they retire from driving.

The main contribution of this work is the formal introduction of the concept of value re-creation at the overall and value dimension level, and development of a conceptual model that explains how this value re-creation can occur. The model shows the resource contributions required across all levels of the ecosystem, expanding on existing conceptualisations that have predominantly focussed on resource contributions at the individual and service levels.