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Though undergoing changes for a decade, the foster care system in Poland is still dominated by the adult model of childhood management. Assuming that the biological, psychological and social immaturity of children precludes their autonomy, this model expects adults to focus on control over the integration of a child into society. A consequence is the instrumentalisation of childhood and the deprivation of a child's sense of agency, i.e., the right to (co-)create one's own life space. Additionally, the foster care system concentration on adult problems relegates children to the background. Treatment of children as the object of adult interactions significantly impedes approaches that could empower, reduces chances for relationships built on dialogue, limits a child's openness and authenticity and hinders development of his/her identity structure and resourcefulness. Such institutionalised systems do not satisfy a child's needs, especially unconditional acceptance, enjoyment of life, and self-fulfilment. Instead, from the child's perspective, residential/foster care is a traumatic experience that deprives a human being of childhood. Such an institutional experience interferes in the acquisition of functional patterns for adulthood, reinforces traumas, and denies a chance to reclaim one's childhood. Research conducted with children indicates a need for a change in direction. The aim herein is to show the current situation of children in the Polish foster care system, identify threats to the development of an autonomous identity, and present an alternative, child-centred foster care model in which the caregiver treats the child as a competent person.

The benefits of a student-led mental health promotion intervention on World Mental Health day result in tangible learning benefits for those students. The event occurs within the students’ own university. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This case study evaluates students’ experience on a mental health promotion intervention. This intervention was to enable students to experience running a health promotion intervention and develop their health promotion skills outside of their lectures. Students were recruited who had just completed a module on health promotion. Students had to plan and organise the intervention, which included involving other organisations and facilities both external and internal to the university. The experience was evaluated through the case study using as data collection a semi-structured interview.

Results indicated that students found the experience to be beneficial in deepening their understanding of health promotion, mental health awareness and in increasing their self-esteem. Limitations of this case study are in the argument for reproducibility of results, which is affected by the small number of students who took part.

There are opportunities to develop this idea further and to broaden the availability of the initiative, enabling more students from diverse backgrounds to experience putting theory into practice.

To the best knowledge of the author, this study, although with limitations, provided a good understanding on how to develop health promotion skills within a university setting. The outcomes of this study are mainly applicable to a health studies course, educators of mental health promotion, university mental health support services and research related to this topic, especially on promoting mental health awareness and education.

This study aims to identify the key indicators for quality enhancement in an educational institute which affect student’s outcome in terms of employability and entrepreneurship. These indicators can be used for improving the quality of engineering institutions imparting technical education.

Review of conceptual and empirical literature has been done to establish a linkage between institutional factors and quality output. The paper further identifies existing quality gaps in engineering education that make their students misfit to the requirements of market.

The relevant literature reviewed suggests that quality of technical institutions can be viewed form two perspectives: first, students’ achievement in the form of placements, entrepreneurial output, enrollment in higher studies and university ranks. Second, faculty research output in the form of publication in refereed journals, consultancy projects and patents. The study concludes by stating that when these two important stakeholders are provided with the infrastructural support and environment to showcase their skill, the quality of technical institutions improves automatically.

The study is conducted on technical institutions engaged in providing engineering education. This research can be extended to other disciplines.

The framework proposed in the study will help technical institutions in evaluating their service quality levels which will further help them in improving the same.

The industrial training component in a university's curricula adds tremendous value to a degree programme by enhancing the employable skills of graduates. The purpose of this paper is to assess the perception of organisations that have trained construction students from the Department of Building Technology of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, as part of its industrial training programme.

Through a structured questionnaire survey of 120 organisations which have offered industrial training to construction students in the Accra, Kumasi and Cape Coast metropolitan areas of Ghana, the paper assessed industry's views on issues relating to the nature and objectives of industrial training, preparation towards training, performance of students during training, effectiveness of the training and areas of improvement. Data collected through the survey were analysed using largely descriptive statistics and content analysis.

In the opinion of the training organisations, industrial training exposes students to real work environment and helps them to apply theory to practice. During industrial training, the trainees showed high level of performance achievement in their ability to carry out instructions, ability to function as team players and ability to apply knowledge gained from the university among others. However, they showed a low level of performance achievement in negotiation skills, independence, social and multi‐racial awareness and ability to make decisions. Major areas requiring improvement in the way industrial training is currently organised include: the need for learning institutions to provide guidelines for industrial training for use by host organisations and to monitor trainees during industrial training; training organisations should design training programmes which emphasise all competencies, appoint industrial supervisors and submit industrial feedback to learning institutions.

The findings from the study will not only make industrial training programmes in Ghana and other developing countries more effective and successful towards the improvement of skills of trainees and thereby increase their chances of employment after graduation but also provide a reliable source of highly skilled and educated workers and an expanded pool of qualified future employees.

The paper provides a basis for enhancing and developing effective IT practices as well as providing indicators for evaluating existing IT practices in Ghanaian and other universities in developing countries to positively influence future employees of the construction industry.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of transformation in the Northern Health region of British Columbia (BC), Canada, based on a new relationship between governments of BC, Canada, and First Nations.

Written from the perspective of four key participants in the transformation process, this paper highlights the ways in which partnership has been integral to the transformation of health service delivery to First Nations communities in Northern BC.

In sharing their experiences with health system transformation through partnership, the authors of this paper hope to contribute to a growing set of promising practices as indigenous health service organizations take a greater role in health service provision, and non-indigenous health service organizations improve their understanding of and relationships with indigenous communities.

This paper outlines a unique and leading edge transformation in health service delivery, told from the perspectives of key partners involved in the transformation process.

The “patient journey” technique is one that has been used by health care providers to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of their service delivery. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the experience of adapting this approach for use in an atypical context – the comparison of two systems for managing health care complaints and notifications. It highlights a number of relevant considerations and provides suggestions for similar studies.

The design and methods of the study are described, with commentary on the success of key aspects and challenges encountered. To enable comparison between the two systems, this study had a “paired” design, in which examples were selected from each system so that they matched on basic, prescribed, criteria. Data about each matter’s journey were then collected from administrative records.

While, overall, the technique provided rich data on the processes of the systems under investigation, the type of data collected (related to administrative/communicative events) and the study’s comparative purpose required consideration and management of a number of issues. These included the implications of using administrative records and the impact of differences between the systems on the paired design.

This paper describes an attempt to apply the “journey” approach in a context that is uncommon in two ways: first, in its focus on regulatory processes (complaint/notification handling), rather than care provision to an individual patient; and second, in its objective of comparing two different systems. It is hoped this account will assist in further development of this technique.

Organizations are currently striving to become more sustainable, as resources dwindle and social desirability for sustainability increases. This is important in public sector organizations as well as private, and exemplars are needed. Therefore, this chapter provides a description of how a public housing authority in pursuit of a social mission parlayed an energy performance contract into a triple bottom line sustainability journey. The Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority's (CMHA) sustainability journey has been shaped most significantly by the commitment of CMHA leadership to collaboration (internal and external) as a core strategy. The chapter provides a rich description of CMHA's emergent partnerships with various organizations in their environment; focusing first on energy and later encompassing social, ecological, and economic sustainability. It describes and analyzes the leadership that emerged which played an essential role in supporting the complexity of increasing collaborative involvement. New theories of leadership, most specifically Complexity Leadership Theory (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2008), emergent leadership (Goldstein et al., 2010), and adaptive leadership (Heifetz, 1994) are used to make sense of the leadership philosophy and actions that worked in the sustainability journey.

The purpose of this viewpoint article is to share the reflections of school and university leaders on the success of their emerging school–university partnership for the preparation of middle school teachers.

The article is a reflective paper in which the leaders of the school–university partnership discuss the benefits of establishing the initial school–university partnership and reflect on what has helped the partnership experience success in the partnership's first five years of existence.

While the authors describe their school-university partnership as emerging, both the school and the university have experienced successes. Upon reflection, the authors discuss four specific essential elements to their initial partnership success. Communication and collaboration among all stakeholders ensure all voices are heard and valued. Allowing the university to have a physical presence in the middle school encourages the building of trusting relationships. For partnerships to succeed, partners must allow time for the partnership to mature and grow. Finally, when the middle school hires graduates from the partnering university, this benefits both the school and university partners.

As teacher preparation moves further away from the university campus to engage more closely with schools, there are lessons to be learned. Reflection is an essential component of growth. The partners in this school–university partnership believe sharing the partners' experiences will enhance the effectiveness of the partners' own partnership and encourage others that choose to begin this journey.

Previous research focused on open innovation (OI) suggests that enterprises benefit from adopting the journey; however, the relationship among OI, marketing journey and knowledge-intensive innovation marketing activities (KIIMA) remains unclear. The present study proposes a conceptual model of the marketing journey linking heterogeneous modes of marketing collaboration to knowledge-intensive activities.

The conceptual model was tested via ordinary least squares (OLS) linear regression based on a sample of data drawn from the Eurostat database.

The results indicate that strategies are a robust proxy for evaluating KIIMA, and partnerships, heterogeneous sources of knowledge and different marketing modes for collaboration among European knowledge-intensive firms are core antecedents of KIIMA, such as new-product development and marketing innovation, as well as firms' sustainable competitive advantage.

This study fills the gap by tracking the role of the journey within marketing collaborations on KIIMA, and it intervenes in the debate about interactive marketing innovation mechanisms. The study contributes to OI, knowledge management and the marketing literature by identifying the heterogeneous modes for marketing collaborations under which the marketing journey enhances knowledge-intensive activities such as those for marketing innovation.