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The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain the change process in Northern Ireland policing through an analysis of temporally bracketed change phases and key change delivery themes ranging from 1996 to 2012.

The research approach adopted is process based, longitudinal and multi-method, utilising “temporal bracketing” to determine phases of change and conjunctural reasoning to unravel the systematic factors interacting over time, within the case.

The paper identifies and temporally brackets four phases of change: “Tipping point”; “Implementation, Symbolic Modification and Resistance”; “Power Assisted Steering”; and “A Return to Turbulence”, identifies four themes that emerge from RUC-PSNI experience: the role of adaptive leadership; pace and sequencing of change implementation; sufficient resourcing; and the impact of external agents acting as boundary spanners, and comments on the prominence of these themes through the phases. The paper goes on to reflect upon how these phases and themes inform our understanding of organisational change within policing organisations generally and within politically pressurised transition processes.

The contribution of the paper lies in the documentation of an almost unique organisational case in an environmentally forced change process. In this it contains lessons for other organisations facing similar, if less extreme challenges and presents an example of intense change analysed longitudinally.

Ashton‐Tate's dBASE, in its various versions, is undoubtedly the most widely used database management program in libraries. Scores of articles in the library literature describe dBASE applications in libraries. They are usually written by enthusiastic dBASE users who have discovered how to bend and twist the program to accomplish a library specific application. The articles vary greatly in accuracy, documentation, and usefulness.

This paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned successful innovator and leader regarding the challenges of bringing technological discoveries to fruition. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Dr Robin R. Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University; Co-lead, Emergency Informatics EDGE Innovation Network Center, Texas A&M, Director of the Humanitarian Robotics and AI Laboratory and Vice President of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) http://crasar.org. In this interview, Dr Murphy provides answers to questions regarding her pioneering experiences in rescue robotics.

As a child, Dr Murphy knew she wanted to be a mechanical engineer and obtained her BME degree from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). While working in industry after her BME, she fell in love with computer science and received an MS and PhD in Computer Science at Georgia Tech where she was a Rockwell International Doctoral Fellow. In the mid-1990s, while teaching at the Colorado School of Mines, she pioneered rescue robots after one of her graduate students returned from the Oklahoma City bombing and suggested that small rescue robots should be developed for future disasters. The National Science Foundation awarded Murphy and her students the first grant for search-and-rescue robots. She has since assisted in responses at more than 20 worldwide disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse, the Tohoku Tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.

The response to the World Trade Center attacks after September 11, 2001 by Dr Murphy’s team from the University of South Florida (the only academic institution), along with four other teams brought together by CRASAR, marked the first recorded use of a rescue robot at a disaster site. In addition to being a founder in the field of rescue robots, she is also a founder in the field of human–robot interaction and the Roboticists Without Borders. She has written over 100 publications and three books: the best-selling textbook, Introduction to AI Robotics, Disaster Robotics and Robotics-Through-Science-Fiction: Artificial Intelligence Explained Six Classic Robot Short Stories. Dr Murphy has received approximately 20 national awards and honors including: the AUVSI’s Al Aube Outstanding Contributor Award, the Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics, CMU Field Robotics Institute “Pioneer in Field Robotics” and TIME Magazine, Innovators in Artificial Intelligence. She is an IEEE Fellow.

This paper aims to conceptualise the residential and psychiatric hospital as a space where criminality and social harms can emerge. Because of recent media scandals over the past 10 years concerning privately-owned hospitals, this study examines the lived experiences of service users/survivors, family members and practitioners to examine historic and contemporary encounters of distress and violence in hospital settings.

The study consists of 16 biographical accounts exploring issues of dehumanising and harmful practices, such as practices of restraint and rituals of coercive violence. A biographical methodology has been used to analyse the life stories of service users/survivors (n = 9), family members (n = 3) and professional health-care employees (n = 4). Service users/survivors in this study have experienced over 40 years of short-term and long-term periods of hospitalisation.

The study discovered that institutional forms of violence had changed after the deinstitutionalisation of care. Practitioners recalled comprehensive experiences of violence within historic mental hospitals, although violence that may be considered criminal appeared to disappear from hospitals after the Mental Health Act (1983). These reports of criminal violence and coercive abuse appeared to be replaced with dehumanising and harmful procedures, such as practices of restraint.

The data findings offer a unique interpretation, both historical and contemporary, of dehumanising psychiatric rituals experienced by service users/survivors, which are relevant to criminology and MAD studies. The study concludes by challenging oppressive psychiatric “harms” to promote social justice for service users/survivors currently being “treated” within the contemporary psychiatric system. The study intends to conceptualise residential and psychiatric hospitals as a space where criminality and social harms can emerge. The three aims of the study examined risk factors concerning criminality and social harms, oppressive and harmful practices within hospitals and evidence that violence occurs within these institutionalised settings. The study discovered that institutional forms of violence had changed after the deinstitutionalisation of care. These reports of violence include dehumanising attitudes, practices of restraint and coercive abuse.

The following paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD-turned-entrepreneur regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Dr Howie Choset, Chief Technical Officer at the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute and Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Motivated by applications in confined spaces, Dr Choset created a comprehensive program in modular, high degree(s) of freedom (DOF) and multirobot systems. This research led Dr Choset to cofound three companies. In this interview, Dr Choset shares some of his personal and business experiences of working in academia and industry.

Dr Choset received his Bachelor of Science, Engineering (BSE) degree in computer science and his Bachelor of Science, Economics (BSEcon) degree in business from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. Dr Choset received his Masters and PhD from Caltech in mechanical engineering and robotics in 1991 and 1996. Since 1996, Dr Choset has been a Professor of Robotics at CMU and Director of the CMU Biorobotics Lab. He is also the Director of CMU’s undergraduate major and minor of Robotics. Along with his students, Choset formed several companies including Medrobotics (2005) for surgical systems; Hebi Robotics (2014) for modular robots; and Bito Robotics (2017) for autonomous guided vehicles. In 2017, Choset co-led the formation of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute, which is a $250m national institute advancing both technology development and education for robotics in manufacturing. Choset is a founding editor of the journal Science Robotics and is currently serving on the editorial board of International Journal Robotics Research.

Motivated by collaborating with his students and colleagues, Dr Choset continues to make fundamental contributions in design, motion planning, path planning and estimation with the goal of bringing the precision of computer science and applied mathematics to the realities and uncertainties of mechanical systems. Choset’s work has been supported by both industry and government. Medrobotics Corp., a medical robotics company based on Choset’s snake robots, has received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory clearance for both colorectal and otolaryngology procedures in the USA.

Researchers often debate health service structure. Understanding of the practical implications of this debate is often limited by researchers' neglect to integrate participants' views on structural options with discourses those views represent. As a case study, this paper aims to discern the extent to which and how conceptual underpinnings of stakeholder views on women's health contextualize different positions in the debate over the ideal structure of health services.

The researchers chose a self-standing, comprehensive women's health service facing the prospect of being dispersed into “mainstream” health services. The researchers gathered perspectives of 53 professional and consumer stakeholders in ten focus groups and seven semi-structured interviews, analyzed through inductive thematic analysis.

“Women's marginalization” was the core theme of the debate over structure. The authors found clear patterns between views on the function of women's health services, women's health needs, ideal client group, ideal health service structure and particular feminist discourses. The desire to re-organize services into separate mainstream units reflected a liberal feminist discourse, conceiving marginalization as explicit demonstration of its effects, such as domestic abuse. The desire to maintain a comprehensive women's health service variously reflected post-structural feminism's emphasis on plurality of identities, and a radical feminist discourse, holding that womanhood itself constituted a category of marginalization – that is, merely being at risk of unmet health needs.

As a contribution to health organizational theory, the paper shows that the discernment of discursive underpinnings of particular stakeholder views can clarify options for the structure of health services.

The 2011 Offender Personality Disorder Strategy promoted formulation-led approaches to offender management. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how formulation can inform partnership-working with women offenders, specifically those with complex needs including personality difficulties.

Learning from partnership case-work is shared to highlight a psychological understanding of the needs of one female offender, and the organisational system operating around her.

The paper describes the development of a “volcano metaphor” as a conceptual framework to assist workers, without psychological training, to better understand the complexity of a client’s intense emotional world. It also reflects the impact of an individualised formulation for through-the-gate working.

The challenges and advantages of “joined-up” inter-agency working are highlighted, including some ideas on how to promote consistency. These include the use of formulation as the basis for decision making and to help “contain” strong emotions attached to working with complex women offenders. Importance is attached to stable and appropriate housing for such women by anticipating their resettlement needs prior to points of transition, and coordinating provision through multi-agency public protection arrangements.

The paper’s originality lies with the development of the volcano diagram as an accessible format for considering individualised formulation and risk assessment. The paper also offers detailed reflections on wider systemic processes attached to working with complex women offenders. It is particularly relevant to psychological practitioners working within probation and prisons, and also to offender managers.

The role of the learning disability (LD) nurse has developed and expanded significantly within recent years, especially their responsibility for delivering a variety of specialist treatment programmes. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the facilitation of Sex Offender Treatment Programmes (SOTP) and the issues this raises in providing support for LD nurses.

This is an opinion paper and the views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation or group with which the author is affiliated. The aims of this paper are: first, to explore the support needs of the LD nurse facilitators of SOTPs; second, to consider the practical implications of providing clinical supervision and support for LD nurse facilitators of SOTPs; and third, to highlight the need for further research in this area.

This paper does not contain original research findings but offers a discussion of the support needs of the LD nurse who facilitate SOTP, concentrating on the specific themes of training, clinical supervision and support.

Implications for clinical practice are identified and recommendations for further research are made.

Whilst this is not the first consideration of the support needs of facilitators of SOTPs, it offers a contribution to the discussion of how best to support the LD nurse to continue to deliver the high quality, specialist care for people with learning disabilities.