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Service users’ voice is at the forefront of movements within psychiatry that look to create more humanising care. Although genuine co-production of knowledge is limited by the power differential intrinsically functional to the health care setting, the arts have the potential to create collaborative environments and equalise relationships. The purpose of this case study is to describe and discuss the design and pilot evaluation of creative writing workshops in a forensic mental health ward as an innovative method for humanising care.

A creative writing intervention focussing on everyday experiences was implemented in a forensic mental health ward and involved four residents and four mental health professionals working together. Interviews were conducted with the four mental health professionals as part of a service evaluation. Transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis.

Two themes emerged from the analysis of interviews with mental health professionals: “a new way of learning about each other” and “imagining beyond the staff-resident relationship”. The authors discuss the intervention’s benefits in terms of its potential to foster mutuality and empathy beyond the illness narrative.

Creative writing can be used to engage patients and mental health professionals to jointly share everyday experiences and identities beyond illness.

The creative writing workshops present an innovative approach concerning the use of creative arts for humanising care through mutuality.

This chapter explores how different aspects of middle manager identity relate to knowledge, research and practice. It argues that effective leadership depends more upon the person than the role.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 middle managers at a single school of healthcare in a research-intensive, chartered UK university.

The middle managers revealed both core and situated identities. Their core selves included various personality traits such as curiosity, a competitive streak, optimism, sociability and a sense of humour. Their situated selves were shaped by socialization, life history, critical people, and incidents and chance. In a symbiotic relationship with these core and situated components was a complex, tri-partite professional identity, as a healthcare professional, a higher education (HE) academic, and an education manager. All the participants greatly valued professional development and ongoing academic study.

This chapter illustrates how the best postgraduate courses develop exemplary education managers/leaders. They do this not by giving students role-specific skills but by developing their analytical and critical thinking skills. Through a process of deep learning and experience, individuals undertaking a doctorate are able to develop into reflexive and reflective practitioners who can act with personal integrity.

Little has been published about the relationships between the career background, the identity and the role of a university middle manager, and virtually nothing from the field of healthcare. The figure presented in this chapter offers a new framework for understanding the relationship between self, professional identity and role.

The purpose of this paper is to provide directions for research on non-medical health service and servicescapes by building off Rosenbaum’s study of social support for men at a resource center for testicular cancer.

This paper cites literature and introduces directions for future research.

This paper contains insights on non-medical health services and servicescapes, including the salience of social connection for coping, the need to connect with others who are experiencing the same health issue, the relevance of place and face-to-face contact, the role of leisure in drawing people together and the need to look at these environments critically.

This viewpoint provides insights to anyone interested in transformative service research, particularly those who apply this approach to study health-care services.

The number of mental health professionals able to prescribe has, for a number of years, reached beyond medics, but UK clinical psychologists are not yet permitted to train to prescribe. The purpose of this paper is to ask if prescribing could be part of the clinical psychologist's role.

This article lays out three core areas of discussion: what was the drive for non‐medical prescribing? Could psychologists be trained to prescribe? Could prescribing be another tool for psychologists? Currently, UK clinical psychologists are not able to prescribe unless they have an additional qualification as a medic, pharmacist or nurse. This paper ends by considering the position of a clinical psychologist who is also a registered nurse and wonders about the pros and cons of training to prescribe.

It was argued that clinical clinical psychologists who are also registered nurses are best placed and currently perhaps the only clinical psychologists able to train to prescribe. The author questioned his motives for considering training to prescribe and looked at the risks in prescribing.

The author is unsure if he wants to pursue prescribing privileges but makes no objection to clinical psychologists prescribing.

The rate of cesarean sections has been rapidly increased in the last few decades in all the developing as well as developed countries. The rate of cesarean sections determined by the World Health Organization has been crossed by many countries, like Brazil, India, China, USA, Australia, etc. Similarly, this rate has also increased in Pakistan. The purpose of this paper is to explore and identify the factors that are responsible for the rising rate of cesarean sections in Pakistan.

These factors are categorized under medical and non-medical factors. The medical factors include the obesity of mother, age of mother, weight of the baby, umbilical cord prolapse, fetal distress, abnormal presentation, dystocia and failure to progress. The non-medical factors include financial incentives of doctors, time convenience for doctors, high tolerance to surgery, patient’s preference toward cesarean section, private hospitals, public hospitals, income status of patients, rural areas, urban areas and the education of patients. To identify the critical factors, data have been collected and a multi-criteria decision-making technique, called Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory, is used.

The result shows that the medical factors that are responsible for the rise in the rate of cesarean sections are umbilical cord prolapse, age of mother and obesity of mother. On the other hand, the non-medical factors that are the reasons for the increase in cesarean sections are the large number of private hospitals and the unethical acts of the doctors in these hospitals, preference of patients, and either the unavailability of doctors or poor conditions of hospitals in rural areas.

Cesarean section is an important surgical intervention and is considered to be very essential in the cases of existing as well as potential medical problems to the mother or the baby. Cesarean section is also performed for non-medical reasons. In Pakistan, the number of private hospitals has increased and these hospitals provide good health care. However, these hospitals do not work under the rules and regulations set by the government. The doctors in private hospitals perform unnecessary cesarean sections in order to fulfill the demands of private hospital’s owners. In addition to this, it is also found that, nowadays, most women prefer to give birth through cesarean section in order to eliminate the pain of normal vaginal delivery.

This paper investigates the prospects and difficulties of multi-professional teamwork in human services from a professional identity perspective. The purpose of this paper is to explore the mutual interplay between professional identity formation and team activities.

This is a process study of two cases of multi-professional teamwork in family care. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with team members and managers. The analysis follows a stepwise approach alternating between the individual and team levels.

In showing the mutual interplay between teamwork processes and individual identity formation, the study contributes knowledge on professional identity formation of mature professionals; in particular showing how unique individual identification processes have different consequences for multi-professional team activities. Further, alternative shapes of interplay between individual identity formation and team-level processes are identified.

Despite the fact that the sample is small and that collaboration intensity was relatively low, the paper succeeds in conceptualising the links between professional identity formation and multi-professional teamwork.

In managing multi-professional teams, team composition and the team’s early developments seem determining for whether the team will reach its collaborative intentions.

This paper is original in its exploration of the ongoing interplay between individual identity formation and multi-professional team endeavours. Further, the paper contributes knowledge on mature professionals’ identity formation, particularly concerning individual variation within and between professional groups.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate motives and modalities of psychedelic substance use in the psychonaut community that is hosted on the Reddit platform (r/psychonaut). Psychonauts are sometimes described as responsible drug users. Elements of responsible use include sharing stories, advice and experiences, reagent testing substances, proper dosing and education on harm reduction and its practical implication. Investigating psychonauts’ substance use can highlight what responsible use means for them and could inform best practices for psychedelic use.

Qualitative content analysis of posts and comments on the r/psychonaut subreddit was completed. In total, 350 posts were investigated. A combination of deductive and inductive methods was used to both structure the research and to allow room for novel information. To investigate participant’s motives, this combination was used to both collect and analyse the data. To examine modalities, concepts and keywords were formed out of the collected data and then analysed.

Motives for use ranged from self-knowledge, self-investigation and self-medication to increasing artistic expression, curiosity and recreation. Concerning modalities, the respondents put a high emphasis on preparation, set and setting, integration, dosage and gathering and sharing information through research, articles and trip reports. These features are identified in the literature as elements of responsible drug use. This investigation can help by unearthing best practices already in use by the community to inform the bourgeoning movement of psychedelic substance use – both in a medical and self-reflexive setting.

This paper is framed in the context of paucity of the academic literature on people taking psychedelic substances in Western society in non-rave and non-medical settings, with findings that indicate important change happening in the psychonaut subculture.

This study aims to evaluate whether cultural market orientation (MO) of blood transfusion centres and services (BTCS) results in behaviours aimed at offering a suitable service-experience to blood donors and if the relationship between cultural and behavioural MO is partially mediated by BTCS staff members’ organisational identification (OI). Also, it analyses whether certain employee characteristics, particularly their status of medical or non-medical staff, may affect their perceptions about MO (cultural and behavioural), OI and the relationship between these variables.

An online survey was conducted with senior management staff and chiefs of Spanish BTCS, as well as blood collection staff – physicians, nurses and promoters – (147 participants).

Spanish BTCS has a strong belief in the importance of donors as key stakeholders in the donation system, although cultural MO does not turn into behaviours with the same strength. The results also show that there is a direct effect between cultural and behavioural MO, as well as a mediator effect of OI in this relationship.

This study demonstrates that OI is a relevant internal marketing construct with a high potential explanatory power of customer orientation.

This study offers a validated tool to assess and monitor BTCS’ donor orientation and recommends that BTCS’ design effective marketing intelligence systems.

This research contributes to social welfare by helping to explain how the organisational culture of BTCS and their employees’ perceptions and behaviours might help to enhance donor orientation, which would guarantee continual blood collection. This might be useful in the context of negative evolution of blood donation levels in many countries.

This research puts the focus on the role of the BTCS’s employees to understand the process by which a donor orientation culture would translate into market-oriented behaviours aimed to reach blood donor satisfaction, to guarantee a constant, growing blood donor pool. In this translation process, the organisational climate seems to play a fundamental role through one of its main variables, i.e. organisational identification.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain primary care advanced clinical practitioners’ (ACP) perceptions and experiences of what factors influence the development and identity of ACP roles, and how development of ACP roles that align with Health Education England’s capability framework for advanced clinical practice can be facilitated in primary care.

The study was located in the North of England. A qualitative approach was used in which 22 staff working in primary care who perceived themselves to be working as ACPs were interviewed. Data analysis was guided by Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six phase method.

Five themes emerged from the data – the need for: a standardised role definition and inclusive localised registration; access to/availability of quality accredited educational programmes relevant to primary care and professional development opportunities at the appropriate level; access to/availability of support and supervision for ACPs and trainee ACPs; a supportive organisational infrastructure and culture; and a clear career pathway.

Findings have led to the generation of the Whole System Workforce Framework of INfluencing FACTors (IN FACT), which lays out the issues that need to be addressed if ACP capability is to be maximised in primary care. This paper offers suggestions about how IN FACT can be addressed.