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This is the title of the combined dietetics services in Newcastle. It includes hospital dietitians, community nutrition educators and a nutrition education facilitator under the leadership of director Julia Smith. Here Julia Smith, Alison Cullen and Moira Hill explain how the service was set up, its present activities and future plans.

“The dark” has long been associated with women. An attempt is made here to show how the “dark” can be seen as a valuable and significant concept for women understanding themselves as women and their situation for developing a view towards the concept of “power”. Women, as women, have a responsibility to themselves and others to make their voices heard and to become aware of their particular strengths and to develop these strengths both inside and outside existing organisations. Most current organisations are “male‐dominated” and “male” in approach. Both men and women are frequently unaware of the extent to which they are influenced and operating from a gender‐specific approach. Men and women can equally shape their organisations when women reclaim their strengths and refuse their position as a less important, less informed, “minority” status. The issues of conflict and trust in organisations and problem areas in relationships between women are explored.

In the incident command system (ICS) structure, response documentation is formally found within the planning section. However, longer term emergency responses have demonstrated the need for a flexible and innovative role that encompasses a variety of activities, including response documentation, communications science, real-time evaluation of major themes, and information management. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This need can be universally met through the functional role of “Historian,” a term specific to ICS, or in the case of public health response, incident management system (IMS). It should be noted that the Historian role discussed is not related to the academic study of history, but to archiving key successes and challenges during a response. Ideally the Historian should be activated at the start of an emergency response and remain active to capture the overall picture of the response, including internal information, such as lessons learned, response activities, and decision-making processes.

The Historian compiles details of response activities that inform leadership, donors and external communications products while alleviating pressures on the planning section. The primary, minimum output of an IMS Historian is a response timeline, which notes major internal and external events during a response with emphasis on major themes, lessons learned, and creating a user-friendly interface to display this information (see the list “Abbreviated Example of Hurricane Matthew Response Timeline” in the text).

In a world with competing priorities and ongoing emergencies, the Historian’s role of archiving details of response efforts can help the international public health community to share lessons learned and contribute to lower morbidity and mortality among those affected by emergencies.

How Steiner brought to bear the role of the imagination in reconciling ideological polarities on its function in an educational setting cannot be fully understood without examining the outlook on life from whence it sprang ‐ nor without touching upon historical developments in Western education and the extraordinary life and background of Rudolf Steiner himself. This paper uses historical, biographical and autobiographical commentary to develop an interpretation of the origin of Steiner’s notion of imaginative teaching.

This paper reports on the importance and use of information technology in a sample of 150 new small firms. It provides statistical evidence to show that the greater the use of IT, the higher the firm’s performance. By contrast, the owner manager’s belief in the importance of IT to the management of their business is not correlated with performance. Empirical evidence is then presented to confirm that IT use is increasing, in general, year on year, and is being implemented as a management information tool. Finally, a profile is presented of the typical components of a young management information system, within the context of a management accounting framework. It is suggested that, given the proven importance of IT to the new small firm, a management information system should be developed that takes advantage of the opportunities offered by new technology, and that this, in turn, should lead to enhanced performance.

This study examines how small famers in southern Costa Rica think about environmental issues and climate change in agricultural practice and sustainability, assuming local models about these issues must be understood as dynamic representations which are modified in response to both changing conditions and new ideas.

Ethnographic research in Coto Brus, in southern Costa Rica, in the late 1990s and mid-2000s forms the basis of this analysis.

Farmers in this area understand environmental issues in terms of local controllable circumstances around environmental issues. This puts them at odds with government agents and outside researchers, who offer solutions based on their perceptions of the situation rather than farmer perceptions. Farmer resistance to proposals which do not solve problems that farmers see as important frustrates government representatives, who perceive these actions to be arbitrary.

The research is quite limited in time and space, giving only a quick snapshot of a complicated and ongoing problem.

Different models for understanding problems and a lack of understanding of how other stakeholders perceive the situation has made it harder to improve the sustainability of agriculture in southern Costa Rica. Similar dynamics can be seen elsewhere and suggest that a greater attempt to engage with local models and understandings can improve development and acceptance of innovations and improvements.

The exploration of conflicts between local and national/scholarly understandings of environmental issues suggests a way forward, engaging with local understandings and concerns to change behavior.