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Challenges the idea that all teams are the same. Reviews earlier literature giving models of different team types, and sets out to develop the model further. Presents a team type window and examines the roles of the problem‐solving team, the creative team, the tactical team and “the hammer” in managing uncertainty, discussing their needs, their organizing styles and their interaction. Suggests that companies should prepare themselves for potential problems and introduce structures and systems, based around teams, which can cope with all eventualities.

Defines self‐managed learning and explores some of the issues involved. Discusses the continuum relationship between developers and learners who are trying to take responsibility for their own learning. Describes a programme developed by consultants to establish individual responsibility for long‐term learning.

Policymakers implementing pay-for-performance schemes within general practice should seek to design schemes which work with rather than against the professional values and goals of general practitioners. In this way, schemes are more likely to enhance the practitioners' engagement. The purpose of this paper is to show how this was done in two case studies of pay-for-performance design and present the lessons from this study for policymakers.

A Most Similar Systems collective case study of the design of two pay-for-performance schemes for general practitioners, the United Kingdom's Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) and the New Zealand’s Performance Management Programme (PMP) was undertaken, involving 26 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, documentary and literature analysis.

Innovation in processes was found in both case studies which facilitated engagement by general practitioners in the formulation and implementation of these schemes. These were careful selection of highly skilled design teams, use of principle-based negotiation techniques and academic mediation of indicator selection. In addition, in England the majority of members in the combined QOF design team were general practitioners. The evidence from these two case studies reinforces approaches to scheme design which seek to harness rather than challenge medical professional values and which maximise the participation of general practitioners in the design process. Achieving funder/practitioner collaboration should be a key goal in the policymaking process.

Pay-for-performance scheme designers can improve their ability to engage general practitioners in scheme design and scheme uptake by adopting approaches which actively engage general practitioners as designers and users of such schemes.

This study compares two contemporaneous processes of pay-for-performance scheme design and implementation in similar systems of general practice funding and delivery at the national level, offering a rare quasi-experimental opportunity for learning lessons from comparative analysis.

This paper examines the contested value of healthy life and wellbeing in a context of severe austerity, exploring how the value of “Public Health” is constructed through and with material-discursive practices and accounting representations. It seeks to explore the political and ethical implications of constructing the valuable through a shared consensus over the “facts” when addressing complex, multi-agency problems with long time horizons and outcomes that are not always easily quantifiable.

The theorisation, drawing on science and technology studies (STS) scholars and Karen Barad's (2007) agential realism, opens up the analysis to the performativity of both material and discursive practices in the period following a major re-organisation of activity. The study investigates two case authorities in England and the national regulator through interviews, observations and documentary analysis.

The paper demonstrates the deeply ethical and political entanglements of accounting representations as objectivity, consensus and collective action are constructed and resisted in practice. It goes on to demonstrate the practical challenges of constructing “alternative accounts” and “intelligent accountabilities” through times of austerity towards a shared sense of public value and suggests austerity measures make such aims both more challenging and all the more essential.

Few studies in the accounting literature have explored the full complexity of valuation practices in non-market settings, particularly in a public sector context; this paper, therefore, extends familiar conceptual vocabulary of STS inspired research to further explore how value(s), ethics and identity all play a crucial role in making things valuable.

In this paper the commissioners of an evaluation and the researchers jointly review the relationship between research and service development at a local level in an evaluated health authority pilot project to introduce complementary therapies into primary care. The article discusses the importance of organisational arrangements between the research and the service development, focusing on the close working relationship between researchers and stakeholders in the research and corresponding service development. The relationship between the research and service development was not linear and the benefits were not based solely on outcomes of the treatment but also on the ways the evaluation gave insight into how the pilot service was delivered. Factors such as personal commitment to the project, and close working relationships by all concerned are important. These elements are rarely emphasised but have to be taken into account if evidence‐based health care is to achieve its potential.

IT IS A sobering thought that the Canadian Library Association's 31st annual conference last month attracted about 1000 librarian‐delegates to discuss the library needs of ethnic groups; this from a total Canadian population just 40% of the UK's. This year's LA conference in Scarborough in September is the first of the new‐style ‘national’ gatherings, and it must be hoped that the unlimited range will draw a record attendance; but it is not likely to be anywhere near commensurate with the CLA. I realise the problems, but effort must surely start to be given towards drawing much wider representation of all professional sectors and tiers at the British annual conference in future years. The goodwill is there on the association's part. It is the employers, 1 fancy, who have got to be pressed into releasing and funding staff, allied also to a withholding of suspicion by those librarians who still view the LA as an association of public librarians.

ONE MUST BEGIN with Dickens. A chapter by Christopher Hibbert in Charles Dickens, 1812–1870: centenary volume, edited by E. W. F. Tomlin, and The London of Charles Dickens, published by London Transport with aid from the Dickens Fellowship, make a similar study here superfluous; both are illustrated, the latter giving instructions for reaching surviving Dickensian buildings. Neither warns the reader of Dickens's conscious and unconscious imaginative distortion, considered in Humphrey House's The Dickens World. Dickens himself imagined Captain Cuttle hiding in Switzerland and Paul Dombey's wild waves saying ‘Paris’; ‘the association between the writing and the place of writing is so curiously strong in my mind.’ Author and character may be in two places at once. ‘I could not listen at my fireside, for five minutes to the outer noises, but it was borne into my ears that I was dead.’ (Our Mutual Friend)

The purpose of this paper is to assess and compare the knowledge and help-seeking behaviors toward depression among pharmacy students and non-pharmacy students.

The study was a cross-sectional descriptive survey and was carried out among undergraduate students of the oldest and largest university in Eastern Nigeria, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Open-ended questions were used to assess the participants’ recognition of depression and their preferred source of help for a vignette character. The open-ended responses were categorized based on the similarity of thematic content and presented as frequencies/percentages.

A total of 118 out of the 200 pharmacy students sampled responded (59 percent) and 270 students out of the 300 non-pharmacy students surveyed responded (90 percent). A significantly higher proportion of pharmacy students correctly labeled the vignette as depression (61.9 percent) compared to non-pharmacy students (39.6 percent) (χ²=16.57, p=<0.001). Psychologists were the most recommended source of help by both groups of students surveyed. A statistically significant greater proportion of pharmacy students recommended psychiatrists compared to non-pharmacy students (χ²=3.79, p=0.044). There was a significant association between academic level of study and ability to correctly label the vignette among pharmacy and non-pharmacy students [(χ²=18.08, p<0.001), (χ²=10.35, p=0.016)], respectively.

This is the first time the depression literacy of pharmacy students has been surveyed in an African country. The findings from this study are interesting in the context of current efforts to decrease the enormous treatment gap for depression by improving its recognition in community pharmacy settings.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the organisational and procedural arrangements for priority setting in England and Wales. It describes the role of social values in the decision‐making process.

The processes and content of decisions made by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence are analysed using the framework developed by Clark and Weale for identifying social values in health priority‐setting.

While countries are seeking to achieve similar outcomes from their health prioritisation processes, each country has established different systems that reflect the social and legal framework underpinning their health systems. England is somewhat unique in being explicit about assessing “value for money” and using formal cost‐effectiveness in developing policy.

Many countries are now considering the use of formal health economic methodologies to assess the value and prioritise health care interventions. However there is increasing recognition of the importance of values other than efficiency (cost effectiveness) in making acceptable decisions. This is manifest in the range of potential new approaches being developed including multiple criteria decision analysis.