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Steps take in Brighton Health District, with the help of CASPE Research (Clinical, Accountability, Service Planning and Evaluation), to build and maintain an approach to Quality Assurance (QA) are described. The system is based on co‐ordination of — and assistance to — voluntary peer review by clinicians and other professionals. The joint work has two aspects: first, implementation of microcomputer‐assisted trials of QA in a small number of clinical departments and professional/ non‐medical departments which aim to provide a productive environment for development of new indicators of the quality of care, and systems for their use, that are practical and economic for local use in the NHS. Second, the indicators are provisionally evaluated, and, where successful, related to service planning and resource management in the district. Indicators that are successful in Brighton will also be tested in other districts where CASPE is working.

The actual uses to which public art is put have been virtually ignored, leaving multifarious dynamics related to its esthetic encounters unexplored. Both audience agency in placemaking and sensemaking and the agentic role of place as more than a mere platform or stage dressing for transformation are routinely neglected. Such transformative dynamics are analyzed and interpreted in this study of the Derry–Londonderry Temple, a transient mega-installation orchestrated by bricoleur artist David Best and co-created by sectarian communities in 2015.

A range of ethnographic methods and supplemental netnography were employed in the investigation.

Participants inscribed expressions of their lived experience of trauma on the Temple's infrastructure, on wood scrap remnants or on personal artifacts dedicated for interment. These inscriptions and artifacts became objects of contemplation for all participants to consider and appreciate during visitation, affording sectarian citizens opportunity for empathic response to the plight of opposite numbers. Thousands engaged with the installation over the course of a week, registering sorrow, humility and awe in their interactions, experiencing powerful catharsis and creating temporary cross-community comity. The installation and the grief work animating it were introjected by co-creators as a virtual legacy of the engagement.

The originality of the study lies in its theorizing of the successful delivery of social systems therapy in an esthetic modality to communities traditionally hostile to one another. This sustained encounter is defined as traumaturgy. The sacrificial ritual of participatory public art becomes the medium through which temporary cross-community cohesion is achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case study describing the progress that is being made in one city in England to increase access to Care Act 2014 assessments and personal budgets among people with experiences of homelessness and multiple exclusion.

A case study employing a “study group” to describe and reflect on local development work.

The authors focus on the “systems change” activity that was undertaken by one voluntary sector partnership project to address issues of referral and access to adult social care. This included the development of a “Multiple Needs Toolkit” designed to support voluntary sector workers to communicate more effectively with adult social care around the application of the new Care Act 2014 eligibility thresholds. The authors discuss the role of “persistent advocacy” in increasing access to assessments and also the limitations of this as regard the potential for poorer joint working.

Throughout, the authors draw on the “ambiguity-conflict” model of policy implementation to assess if the learning from this single case study might be applied elsewhere.

Against a backdrop of austerity, characterised by public-sector funding cuts and a devolutionary agenda, this paper aims to explore how legislation might address two inter-related challenges which public urban green space (“greenspace) faces in England and Wales, namely, responsibility for provision and identification of supporting funds. It focuses on two proposals: first, the introduction of legislative powers to enable local authorities to create user-charging schemes, and second, the imposition of a local authority statutory duty to provide greenspace.

Adopting a traditional doctrinal approach, this exploratory study provides a synthesis and analysis of statutory materials.

While the study considers debates around user-charging schemes, it suggests that the imposition of a statutory duty to provide greenspace would provide a more equitable and effective solution.

This paper calls for further research to establish the detail of such a statutory duty and how it might operate in practice.

There is an appetite amongst local authority stakeholders in England and Wales for such a statutory duty to better enable them to access the requisite underpinning funding.

Imposing a statutory duty would help in protecting the well-established social, economic and environmental benefits associated with greenspace.

This multi-disciplinary research considers the inter-relationship between two key greenspace challenges: responsibility for provision and funding. It identifies and evaluates a potential model for imposing a greenspace statutory duty, which could address some of these issues.

This study examines the discursive accounts of civil society in a rural English village to understand what these reveal about contemporary political discourses. It employs a critical discourse analysis of the conversational interactions of Ambridge residents. The sample comprised all recorded conversations referencing charities, volunteering and civic action drawn from the two-week period corresponding with the change in UK Prime Minister (July 2019). Using three analytical tools derived from extant theory, it considers the salient political ideology underpinning these social interactions. These tools are illustrated with earlier examples of individual civil activities such as the oat-based civil disobedience of a respected older resident. This analysis scrutinises the philanthropic nature of Peggy Woolley's Ambridge Conservation Trust. The fraught process of village fete planning is cited as exemplifying conventional decision-making mechanisms. Problems of staffing a community shop are considered in the light of an increasing political reliance on community volunteers replacing paid staff. Thus, the relative impact of Thatcher, Blair, Cameron and May are considered in exchanges between Ambridge residents from Lynda and Robert Snell to Jazzer McCreery and Jill Archer. The aim is to explore what Ambridge's civil society tells us about Boris Johnson's Britain.

This paper aims to examine tensions around play, performance and artmaking as becoming in the mix of expected and taken-for-granted discourses implicit in an after-school ceramics makerspace (Perry and Medina, 2011). The authors look closely at one adolescent girl’s embodied performance to see how it ruptures the scripts for compliant bodies in the after-school program. While these performances take place out-of-school and in an arts studio, the tensions and explorations also resonate with broader issues around student embodied, performative and becomings that run counter to normalized school expectations.

A contemporary approach to nexus analysis (Medina and Wohlwend, 2014; Wohlwend, 2021) unpacked two critical performative encounters (Medina and Perry, 2011) using concepts of historical bodies (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) informed by sociomaterial thing-power (Bennett, 2010).

Playing while painting pottery collides and converges with the tacitly desired and expected ways of embodying student in this after-school artspace. Emily’s outer-space alien persona ruptured expected discourses when her historical body and embodied performances threatened other children. While her embodied performances facilitated her becoming a fully present participant in the studio, she fractured the line between play and reality in violent ways.

As literacy researchers, the authors are in a moment of reckoning where student embodied performances and historical bodies can collide with all-too-real violent threats in daily lives and community locations. Situating these performances in the nexus of embodied literacies, unsanctioned play and thing-power can help educators respond to these moments as ruptures of tacit expectations for girlhoods in school-like spaces.

This article updates a review submitted to the Department of Health (DH) in the light of the House of Commons Health Select Committee report on Elder Abuse. The review drew on recent research about elder abuse in the UK, including research published after the Select Committee's hearings, that made specific recommendations for areas of development in research and policy. The aim of this paper is to address specific questions posed by the Select Committee in light of developments up to mid 2005.

This purpose of this paper is to review evidence about the barriers and facilitators to ex-service personnel obtaining employment within social care roles. Social care has long-standing, well-recognised problems of staff recruitment and retention. Policymakers and employers are exploring if there are untapped sources of potential employees. Some ex-service personnel may be interested in exploring a move to social care work with older people but may face barriers to such a move which may need to be addressed.

Databases and grey literature were searched systematically to provide an overview of evidence on this topic. In total, 23 articles were included in the review.

A narrative analysis revealed barriers to ex-service personnel obtaining employment within social care not only related to their previous occupation, health status and identity but also facilitators related to the sector’s severe recruitment challenges and the transferable skills of ex-service personnel. Evidence suggests that learning from health services may be highly relevant and transferable.

This review was confined to English language studies published between 2008 and 2018. Few mentioned specific user or client groups.

This review identified evidence suggesting that learning from health services may be highly relevant and transferable to the social care sector so as to facilitate the transition of more ex-service personnel into social care work with older people.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the content, purpose and effectiveness of the handover of information between care home staff beginning and completing a shift.

This was an exploratory study drawing on ethnographic methods. A total of 27 interviews with a range of care home staff, including managers, registered nurses, senior care workers and care workers were undertaken in five care homes selected to give a good contrast in terms of size, ownership, shift patterns and type of handover.

Most handovers were short – lasting 15 min or so – and were held in the office or secluded area in which staff could talk privately. They lasted longer in one home in which the incoming and outgoing shifts physically visited each resident’s room and the communal spaces. Staff felt that handovers were important for the efficient running of the home as well as to alert everyone to changes in a resident’s health or important events, such as a hospital appointment. In one home, handheld devices enabled staff to follow a resident’s care plan and update what was happening in real time.

This was a small scale study based on data from a limited number of care homes.

The increasing popularity of 12 h shifts means that many homes only hold two short handovers early in the morning and in the evening when the night staff arrive. There appears to be a trend to reduce the number of staff paid to attend handover. Despite this, handovers remain an important component of the routine of a care home. The information contained in handover relates to the running of the care home, as well as residents’ wellbeing, suggesting that, while their content overlaps with written records in the home, they are not superfluous.

Although the literature on handovers in hospitals is extensive, this appears to be the first published study of handover practices in care homes.