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There has been a steady decline in beef consumption in Ireland for over a decade, although 1997 data show that this decline has been reversed. A cognitive representation of perceived meat quality based on prior to purchase considerations, point of purchase considerations and consumption stage considerations was used as a conceptual framework to investigate which quality factors have influenced the decline of beef consumption in Ireland. A representative sample of Irish beef consumers was surveyed in 1997. After measuring the determinants of perceived beef quality, an attribute level factor analysis was used to examine inter‐dependence between the variables. In all, seven factors, accounting for 58 per cent of the variance, were derived. Discriminant analysis found that two of the factors, safety and meat status, differentiated significantly between those who had maintained and those who had reduced beef consumption.

This paper evaluates the non‐healthcare organisational literature on conceptualisations of trust. The aim of the paper is to review this diverse literature, and to reflect on the potential insights it might offer healthcare researchers, policy makers and managers.

A number of the key concepts that contribute to contrasting definitions of trust in the organisational literature are identified.

The paper highlights the heterogeneity of trust as an organisational concept. Aspects of trust that relate more specifically to non‐healthcare settings are shown to have some potential relevance for healthcare. Five aspects of trust, considered to have particular significance to the changing face of the NHS, appear to offer scope for further exploration in healthcare settings.

The NHS continues to face changes to its organisational structures, both planned and unplanned. Healthcare providers will need to be alert to intra‐ and inter‐organisational relationships, of which trust issues will form an inevitable part. Whilst it might be argued that the lessons offered by conceptualisations of trust within wider organisational settings have limitations, the paper demonstrates sufficient areas of overlap to encourage cross‐fertilisation of ideas.

The paper draws together previous research on a topic of increasing relevance to healthcare researchers, which has exercised management researchers for at least three decades. The paper acts as a guide to future research and practice.

This paper aims to discuss the importance of compassion in health care and experiences of Compassion Circles (CCs) in supporting it, placing this into the national policy context of the National Health Service (NHS), whilst focusing on lessons from using the practice in mental health care.

This conceptual paper is a discussion of the context of compassion in health care and a description of model and related concepts of CCs. This paper also discusses lessons from implementation of CCs in mental health care.

CCs were developed from an initial broad concern with the place of compassion and well-being in communities and organisations, particularly in health and social care after a number of scandals about failures of care. Through experience CCs have been refined into a flexible model of supporting staff in mental health care settings. Experience to date suggests they are a valuable method of increasing compassion for self and others, improving relationships between team members and raising issues of organisational support to enable compassionate practice.

This paper is a discussion of CCs and their conceptual underpinnings and of insights and lessons from their adoption to date, and more robust evaluation is required.

As an emergent area of practice CCs have been seen to present a powerful and practical approach to supporting individual members of staff and teams. Organisations and individuals might wish to join the community of practice that exists around CCs to consider the potential of this intervention in their workplaces and add to the growing body of learning about it. It is worth further investigation to examine the impact of CCs on current concerns with maintaining staff well-being and engagement, and, hence, on stress, absence and the sustainability of work environments over time.

CCs present a promising means of developing a culture and practice of more compassion in mental health care and other care contexts.

CCs have become supported in national NHS guidance and more support to adopt, evaluate and learn from this model is warranted. This paper is a contribution to developing a better understanding of the CCs model, implementation lessons and early insights into impact.

This paper seeks to address how and why trust relations in the NHS may be changing and presents a theoretical framework for exploring them in future empirical research.

This paper provides a conceptual analysis. It proposes that public and patient trust in health care in the UK appears to be shaped by a variety of factors. From a macro perspective, any changes in levels of public trust in health care institutions appear to derive partly from top‐down policy initiatives that have altered the way in which health services are organised and partly from broader social and cultural processes. A variety of policy initiatives, including the introduction of clinical governance and the resulting use of performance management to scrutinise and change clinical activity, increasing patient choice and involvement in decision‐making regarding their care, are examined for how they have changed the context for trust relations within the NHS.

It is argued that these policy initiatives have produced a new context for trust relations within the NHS, shifting the inter‐dependence and distribution of power between patients, clinicians, and mangers and changing their vulnerability to each other and to health care institutions. The paper presents a theoretical framework based on current policy discourses which illustrates how new forms of trust relations may be emerging in this new context of health care delivery, reflecting a change in motivations for trust from affect based to cognition based trust as patients, clinicians and managers become more active partners in trust relations. The framework suggests that trust relations in all three types of relationship in the “new” modernised NHS might, in general, be particularly characterised by an emphasis on communication, providing information and the use of “evidence” to support decisions in a reciprocal, negotiated alliance.

The paper examines the drivers for change in trust in health care relations in the UK and develops a theoretical framework for the emergence of new trust relations that can be subsequently explored through empirical research.

This article applies the whistleblowing stages model to whistleblowing journeys as seen in British National Health Service (NHS) Inquiries.

It provides a qualitative analysis of Inquiry Reports since 2001, using Interpretive Content Analysis to allocate material to stages.

It is found that the Inquiry Reports show a wide variety of reporting mechanisms, but that most persons initially report internally. It seems to confirm recent suggestions that WB is often not a “one off” or simple and linear process, but a protracted process. While the simple stages model may be appropriate for individual “whistle-blowing incident” by a single whistleblower, it needs to be revised for the protracted process of raising concerns in a variety of ways by different people as shown in the Inquiry Reports.

The evidence is confined to the publicly available material that was presented in the Inquiry Reports.

It provides a template to apply to cases of whistleblowing, and provides some baseline material.

This paper is one of the first to explore the whistleblowing stages model using qualitative material to one setting over time.

This paper describes a quality improvement project to improve oversight of quality at national board level using statistical process control (SPC) methods, complimented by a qualitative experience of patients and frontline staff. It demonstrates the application of the “Picture-Understanding-Action” approach and shares the lessons learnt.

Using co-design and applying the “Picture-Understanding-Action” approach, the project team supported the directors of the Irish health system to identify and test a qualitative and quantitative picture of the quality of care across the health system. A “Quality Profile” consisting of quantitative indicators, analysed using SPC methods was used to provide an overview of the “critical few” indicators across health and social care. Patient and front-line staff experiences added depth and context to the data. These methods were tested and evolved over the course of six meetings, leading to quality of care being prioritised and interrogated at board level.

This project resulted in the integration of quality as a substantive and prioritised agenda item. Using best practice SPC methods with associated training produced better understanding of performance of the system. In addition, bringing patient and staff experiences of quality to the forefront “people-ised” the data.

The application of the “Picture-Understanding-Action” approach facilitated the development of a co-designed quality agenda item. This is a novel process that shifted the focus from “providing” information to co-designing fit-for-purpose information at board level.

The aim of this paper is to draw together suggestions for future research from the papers and from the discussion that took place at the workshop.

The suggestions are summarised under four broad themes.

At an international workshop on trust organised by the UK MRC Health Services Research Collaboration there was broad agreement that trust was still a salient issue in diverse health care contexts. The workshop proceedings identified a number of important questions for empirical research and several key conceptual, theoretical and methodological questions relating to trust that need to be addressed in support of or alongside this. The collection of papers in this volume starts to address some of these questions.

Considers trust relations in health care from patient, clinical, organisational and policy perspectives.

Mental health services have changed significantly in the past few decades. Currently, our services are transforming from one that was biomedically led to one that encompasses a recovery orientation. Additionally, a new field of study as it related to mental health care is emerging that of trauma-informed care. In this chapter, we explore briefly what we mean by the terms trauma and trauma-informed care. This is followed by a critical examination of how co-production and servant leadership can work together to support individuals through their trauma towards recovery and well-being. From which, we suggest that peer support workers are suitable candidates to co-produce trauma-informed services as they embody the connecting principles of choice and empowerment needed for all three concepts to converge and work together to enhance recovery and well-being. While I focus on using co-production in the mental health space in this chapter, the principles and practices can equally apply to other health and social care services.

This paper revisits the claim of Vinten (1993) in this journal that whistleblowing is achieving prominence as a question of social policy.

It examines literature from social and health policy to focus on the importance of whistleblowing and the policies that may encourage whistleblowing. However, it finds little extant academic literature in social policy, and so it turns to examine documents on whistleblowing in the British National Health Service such as NHS Inquiries, Parliamentary Debates, Parliamentary Committee Reports and government documents.

It is found that whistleblowing has not achieved prominence as a question of social policy in nearly 30 years since Vinten's argument. However, it argues that whistleblowing should be an issue for social policy as it is clear that whistleblowing can save lives.

It supports the growing Parliamentary agenda for legislative change for whistleblowers.

This is one of the first articles on whistleblowing in a Social Policy journal for nearly 30 years and provides an argument that the discipline should pay more attention to a topic that can save lives.