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This article seeks to summarise the recent publication, Turning the Tide: A Vision Paper for multiple needs and exclusions by Revolving Doors and Making Every Adult Matter. It addresses the significant financial and social costs of society's failure to support the 60,000 adults facing multiple needs and exclusions in England today and how this damage can be prevented.

In total, six qualitative evidence seminars and a series of individual meetings were held, with 60 stakeholders consulted. The paper draws on the expertise of member agencies, partners, and the members of Revolving Doors' service user forum who have direct experience of multiple needs and exclusions.

People facing multiple needs and exclusions experience several problems simultaneusly, have ineffective contact with services and, as a result, live chaotic lives. They are a small group but impose disproportionate costs on themselves, families, communities and the public purse. The paper sets out the vision that in every local area people facing multiple needs are supported by effective coordinated services. It argues that to achieve this, a new approach is needed from national government. Five building blocks to achieving the vision are examined in detail.

Drawing on a wide evidence base, the paper shows how politicians, local leaders, and commissioners can act to make coordinated services for people facing multiple needs and exclusions the norm. It is of relevance to service managers/providers who can act now to tackle multiple needs by building partnerships, taking proposals to commissioners, and supporting elected members to develop new approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to holistically explore the information needs of socioeconomically disadvantaged young first-time mothers and associated issues of complexity.

This paper used survey and semi-structured field interviews with 39 young mothers (aged 15–23) from UK areas of multiple deprivations.

Participants reported multiple and complex needs spanning interrelated topics of parenting, poverty and personal development. In the majority of instances, participants were either unsure of their ability to meet their needs or needed help with needs, and several described situations of considerable anxiety and stress. Multiplicity is identified and conceptualised as an important factor contributing to complexity, including three component elements: simultaneous occurrence of needs (concurrency), relationships between needs (interconnectivity) and evolving needs (fluidity). In various combinations, these elements influenced a mother's actions and/or ability to selectively attend to needs, with multiple needs often competing for attention, and compounding issues of cognitive load and affect.

This study draws attention to multiplicity of needs as an understudied topic within human information behaviour and calls for further research into how people recognise and attend to complex needs and influencing factors.

This study raises important questions regarding how we approach complexity of information needs in our design and delivery of information systems and services.

Evidences disadvantaged young mothers to have more extensive and complex information needs than previously understood, and identifies and conceptualised multiplicity as an important factor contributing to the complexity of information needs during major life transitions such as motherhood.

People with a dual diagnosis or other multiple and complex needs often require support from a range of services and agencies. Social policy has focused on achieving an integrated response from practitioners; however, service responses to this group frequently remain fragmented. Practitioners supporting these clients are likely to need knowledge drawn from multiple disciplines and awareness of complex and changing services. Research suggests the value of professional networks for knowledge transfer. The purpose of this paper is to describe one's approach to supporting integration and facilitating knowledge exchange through the development of “communities of practice”.

The paper describes a “communities of practice” model, as implemented by researchers from King's College London and Revolving Doors Agency through their Communities of Practice Development Programme. It outlines potential benefits of the model – identified through focus groups and survey responses of members, facilitator interviews and the authors’ observations as community of practice members. Finally, it discusses challenges and limitations of this approach.

Communities of practice are able to provide a forum for peer support and supervision to mediate feelings of role or service isolation and to sustain practitioner motivation. They can also facilitate inter-disciplinary and inter-agency knowledge transfer. However, the limited resources available to these local networks act as a barrier to developing their capacity to improve responses to people with multiple and complex needs.

The paper uses a case study approach to outline the potential for a “communities of practice” approach to be used to improve responses to people with multiple and complex needs.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the challenges of health information literacy (IL) education in disadvantaged and disengaged at-risk populations; and from the perspective of professionals out with information professions occupying everyday support roles.

A qualitative in-depth case study. The participants were a team of UK Family Nurses providing outreach support to young expectant mothers from areas of multiple deprivations, and the mothers themselves. The data collection methods were observation, survey, interviews and focus groups.

Information needs of mothers are multiple, and not always recognised as information problems, or revealed. Several felt overwhelmed, and actively avoided health information. There is low awareness and/or use of state sources of online health information. Family nurses provide an important information intermediary role, but are unfamiliar with IL concepts and models; consequently, there is limited evidence of client transitions to independent information seeking, or underpinning pedagogical practices to achieve such goals.

Further research is required into appropriate pedagogical approaches to IL education adaptable to semi-structured everyday situations. Recognition of information need requires particular attention, including methods of elicitation and specification in the problematic context.

In an era of digital transitions and public service reforms, the authors raise important questions regarding the true reach of public health policy.

The paper holistically examines nurse–client information behaviours, and extends the discussion of low IL in nurses beyond issues of evidence-based practice to issues of developing healthcare self-efficacy in at-risk clients.

This study aims to understand how staff in homelessness services conceptualise readiness for change in the individuals they support and how this informs their decision-making in practice.

A qualitative design was used. Ten staff members participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were examined through inductive–deductive thematic analysis, using a social constructivist epistemological lens.

Five main themes were constructed: “multiple complex needs mean multiple complex changes”, “talk versus behaviour”, “change is not a linear trajectory”, “the role of consistent boundaried relationships” and “change is not solely within the individual’s control”.

This research challenges existing notions of “readiness for change” as located within individuals and a prerequisite for using support from services. It has implications for staff and services, particularly those which are time-limited and address only single problems; service users may not be ready for some changes, but it should not be assumed they are not ready for change in other areas of their life. The offer of supportive relationships may precede and contribute to readiness for positive changes. Support should be offered based not only an individual’s intra-psychic readiness for change but also how the system might actively work to promote hope that change can be achieved and maintained.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore staff members’ conceptualisations of readiness to change in relation to individuals with multiple complex needs and how this might influence practice.

Due to external challenges necessitating high degrees of innovation and customization without sacrificing cost and quality, many industrial firms need to transform their entire approach to product development. Traditionally, industrial firms have adopted a singular approach to product development based on theories that deal with the development of individual products, individual projects and their management, individual designers and developers, and so on. However, in order to mass‐customize products and services – while at the same time standardizing and streamlining a product platform internally – it is necessary to transform product development theory and praxis towards a perception called multiple product development. The main contributions of the paper will be a discussion of this concept and a case study on how an industrial company has begun the transformation towards multiple product development.

This paper aims to explore the barriers to accessing mental health support for people experiencing multiple disadvantage along with some potential solutions for attempting to overcome these. It draws on evidence and learning from 12 voluntary sector-led partnerships in England funded by the National Lottery Community Fund’s Fulfilling Lives programme.

Qualitative research was undertaken with frontline staff, senior leaders, volunteers, beneficiaries and stakeholders from Fulfilling Lives partnerships. This comprised focus groups (21 participants) and individual face-to-face interviews (41 participants), both of which explored barriers and local solutions to accessing statutory mental health services. Following a thematic analysis of transcripts, research participants and stakeholders were invited to a face-to-face workshop to review and validate emerging findings (34 participants).

People experiencing multiple disadvantage face significant barriers in accessing support for their mental health. These include a complex system that is difficult to navigate, long waiting lists, high eligibility thresholds and models of support that lack flexibility. Fulfilling Lives partnerships have had the funding and the flexibility to trial different approaches. Promising solutions to barriers include the use of navigators, person-centred support and multi-agency networks and training. However, overcoming systemic barriers remains the most difficult challenge.

Fulfilling Lives was a rare example of substantial and long-term (eight years) funding to work with people experiencing multiple disadvantage. This provided a unique opportunity to try different approaches and gather learning. The programme evaluation provides insights into the experiences of people facing multiple disadvantage and those who support them and offers evidence-based suggestions for policy and practice.

This paper aims to remove the self-evidence of the concept of severe and multiple disadvantage (SMD) by drawing upon a historical as well as a critical perspective to show its contingency.

This paper will introduce the concept of SMD by examining how it has come to be understood in the way that it has. This paper does so by exploring key texts which have informed the development of the concept as well as its conceptual near neighbours such as “multiple needs”. This paper traces some advancements of the concept within practice and further research with a focus on the Fulfilling Lives programme and the Lankelly Chase Foundation. Finally, the author reflects critically upon the concept and the manner in which the concept has become operationalised.

This analysis demonstrates how a particular definition of SMD has come to dominate over the past few years because of the research and practice of key organisations. On the one hand, this has further marginalised alternative definitions and ways of working, but on the other hand these stakeholders have been able to influence the way in which UK policy has taken up the concept within its governmental priorities.

To date, research has taken the term SMD for granted which limits the ability to critique its definitions and applications. This is an important and timely contribution because concepts are all-too-often taken for granted and at a pivotal moment when SMD has become nationalised through policy, critique is a political, potentially transformative, act.

People's socializing behavior in social networking services (SNS) presents dramatically different features, forming differentiated online social interaction patterns (DOSIP) in SNS. This study aims to explore the relationships between users' multidimensional psychological needs and multiple social interaction patterns in SNS.

Based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs and use and gratifications (U&G) theory, the authors develop the research model to examine the effects of psychological needs on DOSIP. A survey is used to collect the data of SNS users' social interaction. The authors adopt structural equation modeling–neural network (SEM-NN) integrated method to examine the research model.

Need to belong, need for self-esteem, need for social contact, need for emotional expression, need for cognition, and need for external-esteem have significant influences on both active and passive social interactions respectively.

Based on the categorization of DOSIP into six types in terms of the level of activity and disclosure of social interaction, the authors construct an integrated research model of multidimensional psychological needs to multiple social interaction patterns, and validate the antecedents of DOSIP from the perspective of psychological needs.