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Services for people with dementia in the UK have developed piecemeal in the context of wider agency agendas. Health and social care agencies located in rural areas face particular challenges if they are to be able to support people with dementia within their communities. This article describes a piece of work carried out in three rural counties in East Anglia designed to map services across the statutory, voluntary and private sectors, and to describe the ways in which national policy is being interpreted to meet local need. Examples of innovative practice, as well as gaps in service design and delivery, were identified through an examination of local policy documents and qualitative interviews with strategic managers, frontline managers and practitioners, and local carers of people with dementia. The findings confirm that services for older people with dementia are under‐developed in comparison with services for older people generally, and in comparison with mental health services for working age adults. There are particular gaps with respect to rarer types of dementia, services for people with learning difficulties, and services for people from minority ethnic groups. Historically, a lack of strategic planning has meant that service development has been patchy and unco‐ordinated. Carers have been affected by a shortage of joined‐up information, high eligibility criteria and a change to short‐term working by practitioners. Nevertheless, the potential for developing community‐based and inclusive services for people with dementia is apparent, and the adaptability required of rural areas may, subject to further evaluation, provide a template for service development elsewhere.

Personal medical services pilots were introduced in England in 1998 to provide increased flexibility to general practitioners practising in deprived areas, to improve service provision and reduce inequalities. The aim of this study was to identify health authority perspectives of the achievements of their pilots. Less than half of the health authorities agreed that their pilots’ original objectives had been completely achieved. Support, commitment and enthusiasm from within and outside the pilots, and the ability to be flexible, were helpful in promoting change management. Obstacles were financial difficulties and a lack of understanding of personal medical services. The opinion was that personal medical services had made a highly regarded contribution to the local health economy, especially in the provision of new services and the promotion of new staff roles. The results provide lessons for primary care organisations in England and elsewhere in terms of the factors required to successfully implement change.

This paper aims to investigate whether an organisation's configuration, with regard to its operating environment, could have a bearing on the learning that occurs within the organisation because the configuration can be considered an artefact capable of enabling learning and capable of facilitating the storage and utilisation of the results of learning. This raises an interesting question about the ability of organisations to shape the configuration that enables and facilitates them, which in turn would shape the learning itself.

Reported in this paper is research in healthcare organisations in Brazil and Australia that use a multidisciplinary model of care delivery which test these relationships.

The paper's findings indicate that in the Brazilian case learning has to do with the formal acquisition of knowledge for use within professions, by professionals who are in practice and teaching. In the Australian case learning has to do with the flexible acquisition of knowledge across professions, within and between teams.

This paper is useful to those wishing to facilitate learning in an organisation.

A new service was developed to provide transitional care between acute and secure services for people with serious mental illness who are considered “difficult to manage”. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the work of the service by examining referrals made, strategies employed for each referral, and patient outcomes, as well as investigating issues in the service's development and implementation.

A retrospective descriptive study by review of 38 case notes, and qualitative interviews of 47 staff within the service and those referring to the service.

In the first eight months, 38 patients were referred due to violence, aggression and management problems. Most interventions provided by the service involved working with referring staff, rather than direct patient contact. Subsequently, 16 per cent required referral to higher levels of security. Interviews showed the team's aims needed to be more clearly established, but that ward staff found the service to be a useful and productive resource.

The study is descriptive and retrospective, but showed that the service provided appropriate interventions for managing patients with serious mental illness and challenging behaviour.

A transitional service may have value in keeping patients in the least restrictive setting. Careful planning is needed in designing novel interventions, ensuring clear aims and effective management.

The service under study was novel, and may be useful in facilitating successful transfer from, or preventing admission to, secure services.

There is an increasing recognition of outsourcing firms as new organizational forms with unique systems and practices. This paper seeks to use a configurational approach to integrate learning from outsourcing literature, organization and management theory, strategic management and strategic human resource management in order to understand similarities and differences between outsourcing firms and their performance. It aims to examine if certain combinations of work designs, strategic orientations, client relations and contexts could lead to better organizational performance within a sample of outsourcing firms.

A combination of descriptive and exploratory research design has been used to collect data from 60 outsourcing firms across India. Using survey and semi‐structured interviews, data have been collected from the top management team and non‐managerial employees in each organization (n=836 respondents). Principal components factor analysis, Ward's minimum variance method, K‐means cluster analysis, and χ² have been used to arrive at configurations of outsourcing firms. Kruskal‐Wallis one‐way ANOVA and Tamhane's T2‐test have been used for further hypothesis testing.

Five dominant configurations of outsourcing firms emerge, namely, clear‐eyed strategists, adapting professionals, focalizing artisans, conservative controllers, and overambitious associates. Specific configurations of outsourcing firms are associated with better performance across a variety of organizational performance parameters (average attrition, growth in employment, growth in clients, growth in offered processes and overall satisfaction with organisational performance).

Future research could include financial performance measures and could examine potential conflicts in performance outcomes. It would also be interesting to include client perspective in future studies on outsourcing firm success. Replicating the results of this study across countries would enhance their validity and generalizability.

It is hoped that the findings of this paper will contribute to theory building in the field of both outsourcing and configurational research. At the same time, the study is expected to help managers who are trying to move their outsourcing firms in the direction of sustainable success through the choice of appropriate strategies, designs, inter‐organizational relations and contexts.

This is one of the initial studies to classify outsourcing firms using organizational level variables. While most prior studies have examined outsourcing success from the client perspective, this paper provides an important shift towards studying organizational performance from the outsourcing firm's perspective. Since configurational membership can predict which firms will perform better than others on objective and subjective performance measures, this paper provides a useful framework to managers for structuring processes and inter‐organizational relations while making informed strategic choices.

A review of recent foresight exercises reveals some important drivers of research in Europe. In this editorial, we introduce five main areas where science and technology will be required to deliver tangible gains for society and the economy in the coming years. It is no longer enough for research agendas to be dictated by the supply of expertise from the science base. Increasingly, they must respond to social values like access and sustainability, and humanize the interface between technology and people.

This paper aims to investigate how value drivers of internet medical business model affect value creation through a configurational approach. The internet medical business model (IMBM) is such a business model that integrates online and offline medical services with the driving force of internet technologies covering prediagnosis, in-diagnosis and postdiagnosis. The outbreak of COVID-19 and the support of national policies have boosted the development of internet health care. However, there are still many challenges in practice, such as the unclear innovation path, as well as difficulties in landing and profiting. Academic research has not yet provided sufficient theoretical insights. Therefore, to better explain and guide practice, it is urgent to clarify the innovation path and mechanism of value creation for IMBM.

Based on the sample of 58 internet medical firms in China, this paper adopts fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the configurational effects of IMBM’s value drivers on value creation.

Building on the business model canvas and the characteristics of internet health care, five value drivers of IMBM are identified, namely, functional value proposition, emotional value proposition, user involvement, resource capabilities and connection properties. And the five value drivers form three configurations, which are, respectively, labeled as resource-driven configuration, user-operated configuration and product-combined configuration. From the perspective of the integration of traditional and emerging theories, such as resource-based view, internet economics and value cocreation, each configuration leads to value creation and improves value results with different mechanisms behind it.

First, combined with the business model canvas and the characteristics of internet health care, this paper identifies five value drivers of IMBM, thus improving the relevant research on internet health care. Second, based on the configurational effects, this paper discusses the mechanism behind the configurational effects of IMBM’s value drivers on value creation, thus expanding relevant research on the value creation of business models. Third, applying fsQCA and combining the advantages of qualitative research and quantitative research, this paper adds to the configurations of IMBM’s value drivers that achieve high-value results.

This study seeks to adopt the perspective of service (dominant) logic to investigate the impact of three resource inputs (service content, service process, and service configurations) on the perceptions of value of e‐service customers.

An online study is conducted among 667 customers of a Finnish health‐care web site.

The study finds that content of various services have differential impacts on customers' perceptions of value. The study also finds that some service configurations (combinations of services) are more value‐enhancing than others.

The empirical study was limited to a Finnish health‐care site. Future studies could use this research model to investigate different services and cultures to improve the generalisability of the findings.

Service providers should note that peer services (such as discussion groups) were more value‐enhancing than professional services (such as an advice database). Recognition of the most appealing services and service configurations enables managers to develop and market their services more effectively.

The study is one of the first to demonstrate how e‐service research and practice can benefit by taking a service logic perspective in which service content, service process, and service configurations are treated as input resources in the value‐creation processes of customers.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework investigating patterns of online health communities. In particular, the study draws on coordination theory to identify four community configurations. Their distinct features determine communities’ capacity to internalize and externalize knowledge, which ultimately determines their value creation in a service context.

The authors apply qualitative and quantitative techniques to detect similarities and differences in a sample of 50 online health communities. A categorical principal component analysis combined with cluster analysis reveals four distinct community configurations.

The analysis reveals differences in the degrees of cognitive and affective value creation, the types of community activities, the involved patients, professionals, and other stakeholders; and the levels of data disclosure by community members. Four community configurations emerge: basic information provider, advanced patient knowledge aggregator, systematic networked innovator, and uncomplicated idea sharer.

The findings show that communities can be categorized along two knowledge creation dimensions: knowledge externalization and knowledge internalization. While, previous research remained inconclusive regarding the synergistic or conflicting nature of cognitive and affective value creation, the findings demonstrate that cognitive value creation is an enabler for affective value creation. The emerging configurations offer a classification scheme for online communities and a basis for interpreting findings of future services research in the context of online health communities.

This research combines coordination theory with healthcare, service, and knowledge creation literature to provide a fine-grained picture of the components of online health communities. Thereby, inherent trade-offs and conflicts that characterize the components of coordination theory are investigated.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate resource configuration and service ability in hospital on public private partnership (PPP) model (Chaonan Minsheng Hospital of Guangdong Province), supplying decision-making reference for participants of hospital on PPP model.

Four model of grey relational analysis (GRA) (Deng's correlation degree, grey absolute correlation degree, grey relative correlation degree and grey comprehensive correlation degree) are applied to evaluate resource configuration and service ability, a total of 11 indicators of hospital on PPP model public hospital and private hospital from 2007 to 2011.

The paper finds that different GRA models have different results when the paper applied them to evaluate resource configuration and service ability in hospital on PPP model. More than 60 per cent indicators of resource configuration (total six indicators) and service ability (total six indicators) are assessed as “hospital on PPP model ≻ public hospital” or “hospital on PPP model≻ private hospital” from three models of Deng's correlation degree, grey absolute correlation degree and grey comprehensive correlation degree.

Evaluation of resource configuration and service ability for hospital on PPP model with GRA makes results quantified objective and provides reference for decision making and management. GRA makes the comparison of resource configuration and service ability between hospital on PPP model and other model hospitals becoming possible.

The shortcoming for data analysis method of “large sample” is overcome and data analysis method of “small sample” is realized by using GRA, which broaden the method of evaluating hospital on PPP model.