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The current role of the approved social worker (ASW) will be changed to that of the approved mental health practitioner, who may be a nurse or other mental health professional, if proposed legislation comes into force in England and Wales. This has implications for service users, carers and the mental health workforce. This article draws on literature and a conference discussing this change attended by practitioners and policy‐makers. It considers the complexity of the ASW role and the implications for the AMHP, and sets the related issues in the context of integrated working.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourse of the leadership of professional and public policy responses to the scandals of the care and treatment at the private Winterbourne View and NHS Calderstones Hospitals which demonstrates the lost learning from earlier attempts to provide humane care for the enduring numbers of people contained in similar settings.

An analysis of the use of general management and managerialism through commissioning, rather than a focus on pro-active self-leadership within professional practice or through collaborative, collegiate or distributed leadership has arguably been responsible for the lack of progress.

The emphasis on direction and action by government ministers, quangos, and managers across the NHS and local government has ignored and stifled the potential for initiative and self-leadership by professionals. This is notable for social work, aggravated by the absence of an engaged professional body for social workers.

This case study addresses the limitations of leadership approaches which focus on policy direction, general management, managerialist and commissioning approaches to the reform and delivery, contrasted with the potential of professionals self-leadership by practitioners.

The nearest relative of a patient detained under the Mental Health Act 1983 (HM Government, 1983) has an important role to play. S/he might even object to detention, and in some circumstances, any such objection will have to be respected and the patient cannot lawfully be detained. A recent High Court case examined what it means to object to detention. The judge said that although a nearest relative might be believed not to have objected, detention will only be lawful if that belief was reasonable. He also suggested that in some cases, objection should be inferred from a nearest relative's previous conduct.

The purpose of this paper is to explain a decision of the Court of Appeal about the duty an Approved Mental Health Professional (AMHP) will sometimes have to consult a patient's nearest relative, and to set that decision in the context of an earlier one.

Each decision is examined in detail and one is compared with the other. Reference is made to the Mental Health Act 1983 Code of Practice.

It will be harder for an AMHP to establish that consultation is not reasonably practicable, and it will be correspondingly easier, in some cases, for a nearest relative to obtain information about a patient or achieve proximity to her.

This is thought to be the first time the two cases have been considered together or in their true context.

A patient may be detained under section 3 of the Mental Health Act 1983 (HM Government, 1983) only if his nearest relative does not object. Whether an objection has been made will be a question for the approved mental health professional (AMHP) concerned, but their answer will have to be a reasonable one. If the belief of the AMHP is not reasonable, a patient's section 3 admission will be unlawful. That does not mean, however, that the AMHP's conduct will necessarily be negligent, or that the patient will be entitled to damages.

Concerns over health and safety are important reasons for leaving the mining industry. Yet pull factors such as better hours and shifts may be even more important. A study of 1,384 US male coal miners from 1977 to 1982 is reported. In 1977, 86 left mining and changed jobs by 1982 to other coal mining jobs or jobs outside the industry. Neither push nor pull factors were more important for within‐industry as compared to inter‐industry job changing. Further work is needed to understand the inter‐relations between health, safety and labour force mobility. More emphasis on health as a predictor of intermediate social outcomes is needed.

The Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) was fully implemented in October 2007 within England and Wales as a framework for making decisions about incapacitated persons' care and treatment generally not amounting to a deprivation of their liberty (although such could be authorised under its powers by the new Court of Protection). From a planned date of April 2009, the MCA is to be enlarged by the provisions of the Mental Health Act 2007 (MHA 2007) to encompass deprivation of liberty, with the addition of a new framework of Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DOLS). The MHA 2007 also revised significant aspects of the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA), which were implemented in November 2008. The interface between the MCA, as amended to include DOLS, and the revised MHA is complex and potentially ambiguous. This paper describes in detail some issues that may arise at the interface of the two acts, and seeks to inform professionals involved in the use of these legal frameworks of the resulting complexity.

A two‐dimensional numerical study was carried out to investigate laminar forced‐convection heat transfer characteristics of air flow in a two parallel plate channel with offset plates and heated by a radiation heat flux. The SIMPLE method was used for the numerical prediction of the flow and thermal fields. The flow field temperature boundary conditions were obtained by applying the energy balance equation to boundary elements. The ray tracing technique was used to obtain the net absorbed radiation fractions in the boundary elements. The numerical results were validated with measured temperature values and experimentally calculated values of local Nusselt number (Nu_x), and a reasonable agreement was shown. Then the numerical simulation was used to study effects of design parameters on the convective heat transfer coefficient. It was found that in Re numbers from 650 to 2,550, the optimum spacing of offset plates relative to the nearest channel wall was around one third of the channel height. Also, the optimum offset plates’ numbers can be calculated based on one offset plate length being equal to one and a half times the channel hydraulic diameter. A correlation of average Nusselt number between the flowing air and the offset plates was obtained as follows; —Nu = 1.81 Re ^0.352Pr^1/3(D_h/l)^1/2.

This article aims to outline simple measures which, by making better use of existing legislation and provision, could change the day‐to‐day experience of individuals with learning disabilities currently in long stay hospitals, whilst phased local provision is being sourced for them. The proposals will also promote the safety and dignity of the minority of patients who ultimately cannot be settled successfully within their own community. Further, these measures may help ensure that any individual undergoing assessment and treatment at such a unit, for whatever period, and for whatever reason, will receive care in an environment where abuse cannot go unnoticed or unchecked.

The paper provides a review of the potential to use current legislation and provision to better effect, highlighted by case studies.

Commissioners contracting with providers could include measures to promote the safety and protection of adults with learning disabilities from abuse at little or no cost to the commissioning authority.

This is an original piece of work – developed from a short opinion/comment piece (750 words) originally prepared for the benefit of mental health lawyers in the Law Society Gazette. It is primarily of value, however, to social workers, care providers, adult safeguarding teams, advocacy services and commissioners of services.