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France, once a pioneer in psychiatry, is now sinking as its population faces major mental health challenges. This includes the 12 Million French individuals with psychiatric conditions, the lack of appropriate structures and the shortage of skilled mental health professionals, but it also leaves families in critical situations. The purpose of this study is to explore the carers’ caregiving experiences and to suggest ways to organise educational programmes to support mental health carers in France.

The research was conducted from January 2018 to November 2019. It included French carers of patients with mental conditions. Recorded semi-structured interviews were used and findings were analysed through an inductive thematic analysis and regrouped into key themes.

Participants had overwhelming negative representations of “mental illness”. The fact that they were excluded from participating in the patient’s health management further added to their misconceptions around mental disability, it limited their communication with their family and amplified their burdens.

There is an urgent need for carer empowerment; carers should be included in educational programmes, they should benefit from French Government subsidies and social-network assistance and receive quality assistance by trained mental health professionals. The critical situation of carers can only be addressed by combining these three steps and through the action of appropriate actors in the field of mental health, thus alleviating the current paradigm of psychiatric care in France.

Thousands of research papers regarding carers have been published in other countries. In addition yet, to the knowledge, only a few investigations on French mental health carers have been conducted to this day. The singularity of this research lies in the rare individual interviews, which provided us with first-hand testimonies of mental health carers in France. This data could be of vital aid for professionals and for policymakers when advocating for better support of carers in mental health.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of flexible working arrangements (FWAs) and particularly reduced hours working arrangements on a Dual Agenda of gender equity and workplace effectiveness, in a case study organization employing a relatively high proportion of women scientists.

In‐depth interviews based on the initial stages of collaborative interactive action research (CIAR) are used within a case‐study approach. The interviews explored working practices, the assumptions underpinning them and their un/intended consequences.

The main form of FWA used in the organization, four days a week, is double edged and complex in its effects. It supports mothers, but at a cost because of gendered assumptions. Despite a commitment to flexibility and “work‐life balance”, the gendered construction of the ideal worker and ideas of competence conflated with hegemonic masculinity, remain powerful. This, together with a prevalent “good mother” ideology, undermines both gender equity and workplace effectiveness.

This paper is of value to both researchers and policy makers. It shows that highly developed work‐life balance or flexible working polices are not sufficient to enhance gender equity and points to the importance of surfacing and challenging gender assumptions in science, engineering and technology. It emphasizes the need to move forward from policy to practice.

This paper contributes to a growing body of work using initial stages of the CIAR methodology and showcases the theoretical insights gained by such an approach.

This purpose of this paper is to examine the role of engagement and empowerment in “Transforming Care”, for people with a learning disability. The aim is to shift the balance of power so that people are able to live ordinary lives in the community, in the home they choose, close to people they love. It shares ideas to support people to take control over their own lives and to influence the system, so that it works with people, rather than “doing to” people.

The paper examines barriers and enablers to people having their rights as citizens. So that people have as much choice and control as they are comfortable with to live an ordinary life (bearing in mind any legal restrictions). The paper includes people’s involvement in system/service redesign. It critiques traditional views of looking at language, participation and power. The authors have used the language throughout which people have told us they prefer as a descriptor.

The authors present a framework for looking at the power of, and around, people with a learning disability who have mental health issues or have displayed behaviour that can challenge services.

This paper offers advice on how to address power imbalances at individual level and at organisational/system level. It looks at the language we use, the information we share and how we work with experts by experience to ensure we can transform care and support and enable people to live ordinary lives as citizens.

People living with a disability (PWD) are often a marginalized vulnerable group who are economically and socially disadvantaged. This paper aims to explore the implementation of new social and financial policy reforms aimed at transforming the disability sector. Using the capabilities approach, the authors explore the experience of carers and evaluate how this sector may have become more exposed and vulnerable as a consequence of the new policy.

This is a qualitative study with two rounds of semi-structured interviews; at initial-phase (n = 18) and post-phase (n = 14). Thematic analysis was applied to the capabilities and vulnerabilities framework to categorize and analyze the interview data.

The findings show that there are many ways PWD and carers are experiencing increased levels of vulnerability because of their capabilities. There is evidence of increased vulnerability in the intersections between PWD/carers’ inherent nature, the disruption to vital social relationships and conflicting values and interests of stakeholders and the complexity of situational policy changes.

Practical implications developed from the findings include identifying ways the government can improve its social marketing communication strategies. They also highlight the importance of building effective social support networks and provide guidelines for measuring capacity building to address some of the underlying factors leading to vulnerability.

This paper introduces into social marketing, the three-factor vulnerability framework, which conceptualizes the nature of vulnerability, and examines and evaluates the intersections of these factors in relation to the capabilities approach.

The concept of care has attracted considerable policy and professional interest recently and there has been growing attention both to the needs of carers and how they may sometimes conflict with those of service users. This paper draws on initial research findings to examine experiences of care in mental health for men and women and for carers and users.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the categorization of elderly patients as vulnerable is affected by health-care service interactions with caregivers, which may increase, reduce or even negate entirely elderly patients’ vulnerable status.

The paper reports the results of a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews conducted with a large and varied sample of health-care personnel in charge of elderly patients in two hospital geriatric departments in France.

Findings show that the limits of the service-dominant logic approach when the service (care) relationship concerns vulnerable individuals who are, completely or partially, unable to take part in the co-creation of the service and the roles played by caregivers as resource integrators (intermediaries, facilitatorapomediaries and transformativeapomediaries) and that this affects the categorization of elderly patients as vulnerable.

The results enrich knowledge about the service relationship with vulnerable people by showing that the categorization of elderly patients as vulnerable is not immutable but stems from the dynamics among actors that may variously “reify it” (contribute to its internalization), “reduce it” (enable access to aspects of normal life), or “neutralize it” (help free this cohort from their categorization as vulnerable).

The findings provide insights for care providers by stressing the need to raise awareness among hospital staff regarding their active role in affecting the categorization of elderly patients as vulnerable through their care practices. In the context of public health policies, the findings show that the regulatory injunction to empower patients to preserve their well-being tends to produce the opposite effect on the frailest patients, who are unable to participate in their care pathway.

The research shows that categorization as vulnerable, in the health-care services context, is affected by the care interactions between caregivers and elderly patients. The support provided to hospital staff in this context helps to maintain patients’ well-being and dignity.