Search results

This paper represents a personal view of a newly appointed consultant practitioner trainee in frailty. This role was created as a result of a rapid workforce review of a Frailty Support Team (FST) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The FST traditionally worked alongside other community services. A “One Team” approach was developed whereby prior silos of community nursing, therapy and frailty teams became a single, locality based and mutually supportive integrated community service. This significantly increased capacity for an urgent community response for older people with complex needs and improved clinical management and coordination of care. As a workforce review identified the need for skills development, new roles for trainee advanced frailty practitioners (AFPs) and a consultant practitioner trainee in frailty were established.

Staff experience of the “One Team” model was positive. The changes were thought to encourage closer and more efficient working between primary care and a range of community health services. The improved communication between professionals enabled more personalised care at home, reducing pressure on emergency hospital services. A rapid review of the workforce model has enabled the enhanced team capacity to cover a wider geographical area and improved recruitment and retention of staff by introducing a new pathway for career progression within the expanding specialism of frailty.

The challenge of COVID-19 has prompted rapid service redesign to create an enhanced “One Team in the community.” The innovative workforce model looks beyond traditional roles, values the experience and capabilities of staff and develops the skills and confidence required to provide a more integrated and person-centred specialist community pathway for people living with frailty.

Existing histories of the free kindergarten movement in South Australia scantily acknowledge the key role of Lucy Spence Morice in helping to found the Kindergarten Union (KUSA) in 1905 and subsequently guiding the organisation through financially troubled times, internal conflict with respect to the independence of the Training College (Adelaide KTC) from Education Department control, changes of directorship, and in accordance with its original mission. This article seeks to restore Lucy Spence Morice to a place in South Australian annals alongside that of her distinguished aunt Catherine Helen Spence: teacher, journalist, author, Unitarian Church preacher, philanthropist, political and social reformer, self‐styled ‘new woman’ of the late nineteenth century, and to niece Lucy a dear friend, mentor and inspirational role model. In the light of fresh evidence contained in the papers of Mrs Marjorie Caw (an early KTC graduate), and informed by the work of Caine, Lewis, Ryan, and Goodman and Harrop most especially, it re‐assesses Mrs Morice’s contribution to kindergarten reform from a feminist revisionist historical perspective. I utilise biographical methods and network analysis in order to point up the genesis of Lucy’s zeal for the cause of kindergarten education; also to argue that her informal but expansive social ties, plus her links to professional women and other activists in the fields of child health, welfare and education were central to her work for the Kindergarten Union.

This chapter deals with different perspectives and structural transformations between capitalist society and indigenous ways of life. I approach the A’uwẽ-Xavante myth of the theft of the jaguar’s fire, one of many versions of the story of the bird-nester, which Lévi-Strauss interprets as the acquisition of culture through cooking technique. I compare it with Proudhon’s study on property as the theft of collective force which he treats as the groundwork of the manufacturing process in capitalist society. This highlights the difference between Proudhon’s ideal mutualism, based on free access to means of production and polytechnic education, and the A’uwẽ-Xavante’s acquisition of power and its technical reproduction. Proudhon’s mutualism envisages auto-organization of collective force in cooperative work favoring its collective appropriation by the workers; while in the A’uwẽ-Xavante way of life, there is an off-centered collective force from which technical acquisition is redistributed. In common with Proudhon’s ideal labor mutualism, A’uwẽ-Xavante’s ways welcome outsiders to their means of production of people; but unlike Proudhon’s, this welcome is not for free: they have to prove their generosity and personal commitment to the game.

A pressing educational concern is how to provide effective education for the growing population of dual language learners (DLL) in early childhood settings. Given the robust findings that family involvement promotes children’s academic success as well as recognition of parents’ “funds of knowledge,” one pathway to provide a culturally and linguistically responsive classroom environment for DLLs is to form collaborative relationships between parents and teachers of DLLs. The purpose of this chapter is to describe Project TAPP (Teachers and Parents as Partners), a community of practice (CoP) composed of parents and teachers of preschool dual language learners. The chapter describes the framework of Project TAPP, findings related to participation, and lessons learned.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate researchers’ understanding of place in general and psychogeography in particular.

Melding hauntology, autoethnography, pseudo-psychogeography and object-orientated ontology, the provocation explores aspects of east Belfast’s “C.S. Lewis Trail”.

Psychogeography, purportedly, is moribund. This provocation contends that latter-day developments in virtual reality, augmented reality, digital real estate platforms and “imaginary worlds” more generally, open up new horizons, and offer more opportunities, for the psychogeographically inclined.

The provocation’s originality inheres in the approach adopted not the research findings.

The purpose of this chapter was to examine the implementation of a flexible work initiative that attempted to challenge two institutionalized precepts of contemporary white-collar workplaces: the gendered ideal worker norm, with its expectation of the primacy of paid work over family and personal life, and the assumption of managerial control over employees’ schedules and work location.

Using ethnographic and interview data, how the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) was experienced by employees in four different teams within the Best Buy, Co., Inc. corporate headquarters was explored.

Comparing more and less successful implementation across teams, results suggested that collective institutional work is required for the emergence of new norms, expectations, and legitimated practices. Findings indicated that managers’ task-specific knowledge – their deep experience with the tasks that the team is charged with completing – is a structural condition that facilitates managers’ trust in employees and encourages team experimentation with new practices.

Data for this study was limited to one organization and four teams. Future research should include similar organizational change efforts in other organizations and in larger teams.

These findings may promote a better understanding, among researchers and practitioners, of the importance of manager knowledge and background and how this appears to be key to achieving institutional change.

This research is an example of an innovative approach to workplace flexibility and applies an institutional theory lens to investigate variation in the implementation of organizational change.

While an increasing number of adults with an intellectual disability are having children, research suggests that they face an increased risk of having their children removed. The purpose of this paper is to explore child and family social workers’ experiences of working with parents with intellectual disability, in order to further our understanding of this issue.

Seven social workers were interviewed. Each had experience of working on safeguarding cases where a parent had a diagnosis of intellectual disability. Data were analyzed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis.

Five super-ordinate themes were identified. These were: “feeling torn,” “experiencing a power imbalance,” “hopelessness,” having “pride” in their work’ and experiencing “barriers.”

The results are discussed in the context of the increased risk that parents with an intellectual disability face of having their children removed. Several areas for future research are identified.

The study highlights several areas for development regarding services for parents with intellectual disability.

The study describes some of the difficulties experienced by social workers in this area of their work, from their own perspective. It also strengthens existing ideas about improving services for parents with intellectual disability.

This chapter explores women leaders’ outward appearance in the male-dominated world of rail, through the lenses of postfeminism and neoliberalism. Drawing on 31 interviews with women leaders in rail, it maps how a postfeminist logic is evident in women leaders’ narratives of aesthetic femininity. Aesthetic femininity refers to women leaders’ outward appearance which they describe as feminine. The research participants justify their feminine ‘work style’ through postfeminist themes of individual choice, natural sex differences, irony, personal initiative, skill and empowerment. The findings also show a patterning of justification around aesthetic femininity that fits a neoliberal self-governance as enterprise, self-flexibility and self-confidence. It is argued that whilst these iterations of aesthetic femininity are rooted in postfeminist and neoliberal contexts, they have consequences for sustaining gendered inequalities and traditional feminine norms in the highly masculinised culture of rail. Women’s narratives, whereby gender inequalities are acknowledged then subsumed into individualised agency through dress and appearance, do little to challenge the gendered culture in this sector.