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The purpose of this paper is to outline the qualitative research findings of the effectiveness of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service Programme Needs Assessment (PNA) in supporting decision making regarding selection onto high-intensity offending behaviour programmes.

Qualitative data analysis was used through the application of thematic analysis. Results were pooled using principles from meta-synthesis in order to draw conclusions as to whether the PNA was operating as designed.

Four overarching themes were identified, which have meaning in guiding decision making into, or out of high-intensity programmes. These were risk, need and responsivity, the importance of attitudes, motivation and formulation and planning.

The majority of data were collected from category C prisons. Generalisability of findings to high-intensity programmes delivered in maximum security prisons and prisons for younger people aged 18–21 years is limited. The research team had prior knowledge of the PNA, whether through design or application. Procedures were put in place to minimise researcher biases.

Findings suggest that the PNA is effective in guiding clinical decision making. Practitioners and policy makers can be assured that the processes in place to select into high-intensity programmes are effective, and aligned with the What Works in reducing re-offending.

This is the first evaluation into the effectiveness of the PNA designed to support clinical decision making regarding participant selection onto accredited offending behaviour programmes. Implications for practice have been discussed.

This paper aims to first introduce the four contributions to the themed issue of The Learning Organization entitled “Learning Organization/Organizational Learning and Gender Issues”. Second, the commonalities among these articles function as themes that can generate further research and engaged or problem-driven scholarship and practice.

Feminist critique.

These articles challenge commonsense, blur boundaries between reality and imagined visions and form a multilevel matrix for understanding and change regarding gendered learning organizations.

As an introduction to a special issue, this essay summarizes and extends on the four contributions and then extends the insights to encourage discovery, learning and engagement.

This paper aims to use (in)visibility as a lens to understand the lived experience of six women managers in the headquarters of a large multinational organization in the UK to identify how “gender” is expressed in the context of organizational learning.

The researchers take a phenomenological approach via qualitative data collection with a purposeful sample – the six female managers in a group of 24. Data were collected through quarterly semi-structured interviews over 12 months with the themes – knowledge, interaction and gender.

Organizations seek to build advantage to gain and retain competitive leadership. Their resilience in a changing task environment depends on their ability to recognize, gain and use knowledge likely to deliver these capabilities. Here, gender was a barrier to effective organizational learning with women’s knowledge and experience often unseen and unheard.

This is a piece of research limited to exploration of gender as other, but ethnicity, age, social class, disability and sexual preference, alone or in combination, may be equally subject to invisibility in knowledge terms; further research would be needed to test this however.

Practical applications relate to the need for organizations to examine and address their operations for exclusion based on perceived “otherness”. Gendered organizations cause problems for their female members, but they also exclude the experience and knowledge of key individuals as seen here, where gender impacted on effective knowledge sharing and cocreation of knowledge.

The study offers further evidence of gendered organizations and their impacts on organizational effectiveness, but it also offers insights into the continues social acceptance of a masculinized normative model for socio-economic practice.

This exploration of gender and organizational learning offers new insights to help explain the way in which organizational learning occurs – or fails to occur – with visibility/invisibility of one group shaped by gendered attitudes and processes. It shows that organizational learning is not gender neutral (as it appears in mainstream organizational learning research) and calls for researchers to include this as a factor in future research.

This paper describes a quality improvement project to improve oversight of quality at national board level using statistical process control (SPC) methods, complimented by a qualitative experience of patients and frontline staff. It demonstrates the application of the “Picture-Understanding-Action” approach and shares the lessons learnt.

Using co-design and applying the “Picture-Understanding-Action” approach, the project team supported the directors of the Irish health system to identify and test a qualitative and quantitative picture of the quality of care across the health system. A “Quality Profile” consisting of quantitative indicators, analysed using SPC methods was used to provide an overview of the “critical few” indicators across health and social care. Patient and front-line staff experiences added depth and context to the data. These methods were tested and evolved over the course of six meetings, leading to quality of care being prioritised and interrogated at board level.

This project resulted in the integration of quality as a substantive and prioritised agenda item. Using best practice SPC methods with associated training produced better understanding of performance of the system. In addition, bringing patient and staff experiences of quality to the forefront “people-ised” the data.

The application of the “Picture-Understanding-Action” approach facilitated the development of a co-designed quality agenda item. This is a novel process that shifted the focus from “providing” information to co-designing fit-for-purpose information at board level.

The purpose of this study is to present a quality improvement approach titled “Picture-Understanding-Action” used in Ireland to enhance the role of healthcare boards in the oversight of healthcare quality and its improvement.

The novel and practical “Picture-Understanding-Action” approach was implemented using the Model for Improvement to iteratively introduce changes across three quality improvement projects. This approach outlines the concepts and activities used at each step to support planning and implementation of processes that allow a board to effectively achieve its role in overseeing and improving quality. This approach matured over three quality improvement projects.

The “Picture” included quantitative and qualitative aspects. The quantitative “Picture” consisted of a quality dashboard/profile of board selected outcome indicators representative of the health system using statistical process control (SPC) charts to focus discussion on real signals of change. The qualitative picture was based on the experience of people who use and work in health services which “people-ised” the numbers. Probing this “Picture” with collective grounding, curiosity and expert training/facilitation developed a shared “Understanding”. This led to “Action(s)” from board members to improve the “Picture” and “Understanding” (feedback action), to ask better questions and make better decisions and recommendations to the executive (feed-forward action). The Model for Improvement, Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles and a co-design approach in design and implementation were key to success.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time a board has undertaken a quality improvement (QI) project to enhance its own processes. It addresses a gap in research by outlining actions that boards can take to improve their oversight of quality of care.

UK higher education has faced an unprecedented period of change due to multiple UK governmental policies over a short period – coupled with demographic change and the vote to leave the European Union. This pressures universities to meet third mission aims by engaging effectively with society and business, generating income in the process to address reduced funding. Support from the UK Government includes over 20 years of funding for universities to develop entrepreneurial structures and processes, termed entrepreneurial architecture (EA). While the government regularly collects data on funds generated through third mission activities, less is known about how EA is perceived by those inside the university. The purpose of this paper is to meet that gap by exploring the perspectives of those employed specifically as part of EA implementation, as knowledge exchange intermediaries.

The study takes a phenomenological approach to achieve deeper insights into those routines and norms resulting from the application of EA. This is a purposeful sample with what is reported to be an under-researched group (Hayter, 2016); those employed as internal knowledge intermediaries across 15 universities (two from each). These university employees are specifically charged with business engagement, knowledge exchange and research commercialization; their contracts are funded and designed as a part of the EA rather than for research or teaching. An initial pilot comprising four semi-structured interviews indicated suitable themes. This was followed up through a set of three interviews over 18 months with each participant and a mapping of EA components at each institution.

Despite EA strategies, the picture emerging was that universities had embedded physical components to a greater or lesser degree without effective social architecture, shown by conflicts between stated and actual routines and norms and by consistent barriers to third mission work. Power and perceived power were critical as participants felt their own worth and status was embedded in their senior manager’s status and power, with practical difficulties for them when he or she lost ground due to internal politics.

The benefits of this study method and sample include deep insights into the perspectives of an under-reported group. The purposeful sample might be usefully expanded to include other countries, other staff or to look in depth at one institution. It is a qualitative study so brings with it the richness, insights and the potential lack of easy generalizability such an approach provides.

In designing organizations to achieve third mission aims, EA is important. Even where the structures, strategies, systems, leadership and culture appear to be in place; however, the resulting routines and norms may act against organizational aims. Those designing and redesigning their institutions might look at the experience suggested here to understand how important it is to embed social architecture to ensure effective actions. Measuring cultures and having this as part of institutional targets might also support better results.

Governments in the UK have invested resources and funding and produced policy documents related to the third mission for over 20 years. However, the persistent gap in universities delivering on policy third mission aims is well documented. For this to change, universities will need to ensure their EA is founded on strong underlying supportive cultures. Knowledge sharing with business and community is unlikely when it does not happen in-house.

The study adds new knowledge about how EA is expressed at individual university level. The findings show the need for more research to understand those routines and norms which shape third mission progress in UK universities and how power relations impact in this context, given the pivotal role of the power exerted by the senior manager.

The purpose of this paper was to describe the experiences of four children with autism spectrum disorder navigating around the corridors of an unfamiliar school and translate the findings into poetic format. Poetry could provide a more accessible format to a nonacademic audience and promote empathy and understanding about this population.

Each participant was shown a route from the start point to the destination by the researcher then asked to lead the way there. Post-study, participants were interviewed for their perceptions and feelings about navigating.

Participants' responses and behaviors differed, e.g. some were stimulated by colors, some noticed small details and some were distracted. Poetic translation vividly emphasized these behaviors and emotions.

Few studies have described how children with autism navigate the built environment or asked their opinion about navigating. None in the field have used poetic translation to explore data.

The Research Autism Cygnet Mentoring project was a two-year pilot study, completed in 2016, which aimed to develop, trial and evaluate a mentoring scheme designed with input from autistic people, their families and supporters. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The mentoring scheme involved 12 matched pairs (mentor/mentee) meeting once per week for one hour, over a six-month period. All mentors attended a training day, led by the principles of personal construct theory and an emancipatory research ethos. The project and training involved significant involvement of autistic people in both its design and delivery.

Participants on the autism spectrum found their mentoring experience very helpful in enabling them to progress towards self-identified goals, and mentees felt empowered by the person-centred ethos and the methods employed on the project. However, a number of aspects of the mentoring project have been identified that require further investigation, including: caution over offering mentoring without formal structures, boundary setting, supervision, flexibility and the matching of mentees with mentors.

The project has highlighted the potential benefits of time-limited goal-orientated mentoring and the negligible evidence base underpinning current mentoring practice with adults on the autism spectrum. In order for the project to realise its emancipatory aim, there is a need for a large-scale quantitative study and a health-economics analysis to provide the necessary evidence base for mentoring to be recommended as a cost-effective intervention with clear benefits for individual wellbeing.

The current pilot study explored food insecurity, food waste, food related behaviours and cooking confidence of UK consumers following the COVID-19 lockdown.

Data were collected from 473 UK-based consumers (63% female) in March 2020. A cross-sectional online survey measured variables including food insecurity prevalence, self-reported food waste, food management behaviours, confidence and frequency of use of a range of cooking methods, type of food eaten (ultra-processed, semi-finished, unprocessed) and packaging type foods are purchased in.

39% of participants have experienced some food insecurity in the last 12 months. Being younger, having a greater BMI and living in a smaller household were associated with food insecurity. Green leaves, carrots, potatoes and sliced bread are the most wasted of purchased foods. Polenta, green leaves and white rice are the most wasted cooked foods. Food secure participants reported wasting a smaller percentage of purchased and cooked foods compared to food insecure participants. Overall, participants were most confident about boiling, microwaving and stir-frying and least confident with using a pressure cooker or sous vide. Food secure participants were more confident with boiling, stir-frying, grilling and roasting than insecure food participants.

This has implications for post lockdown policy, including food policies and guidance for public-facing communications.

We identified novel differences in self-report food waste behaviours and cooking confidence between the food secure and insecure consumers and observed demographics associated with food insecurity.

This paper asks how the introduction of “smart” digital technologies might affect the goals that can be attributed to telecare for older people, by those coordinating its provision.

A total of 29 in-depth, qualitative interviews were conducted with local authorities, housing associations and other organisations coordinating smart telecare provision, as well as telecare manufacturers and suppliers. Interviews were analysed by using qualitative thematic analysis.

The analysis reveals discrepancies between the goals and outcomes of smart telecare provision, according to those coordinating service delivery. This study concludes that the goal for smart telecare to be preventative and cost-efficient may be complicated by various organisational and operational challenges associated with coordinating provision.

New, “smart” telecare technology for older people stands apart from earlier, user-activated or automatic devices. It may have distinct and under-researched organisational and ethical implications.