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Patient surveys can be used to enable hospital management to evaluate the services they provide. This study shows high levels of patient satisfaction with the quality of their consultations and the attitude shown to them by medical staff. Patient feedback shows that despite the introduction of the Patients’ Charter, waiting times from referral to appointment and delays in clinics are still identified as the main areas for improvement. Findings show that patients are, however, remarkably tolerant and understanding of the pressures and demands placed on outpatient staff.

This chapter traces the intersectional experiences of one Black woman through pre-Brown schooling, becoming a teacher under a post-Brown court order, hiring teachers as a school leader in a large metropolitan, southern city, to her current position as a leader-educator at a state university. Informed and contextualized by social, political, and historical events associated with the pre-Brown segregation, desegregation, and post-Brown eras, this chapter uses narrative autoethnographic reflectivity and storytelling to understand and analyze the nuances of educational hiring practices through the prism of one Black woman's educational journey. The story is significant because it not only provides evidence of the subtleties and nuances of racism but it also describes the changes in teaching, leadership, and hiring practices in southern public education over the last 60 years.

The task of changing the organizational climate of a school is only one tiny example of the fundamental issue of permanence and change. This example can only be understood in the light of a broad social and intellectual matrix. Two prime questions are: Under what conditions can the organizational climate be changed? If it can be changed, what approach is most appropriate? There is a great deal that is not known about organizational climate. Research is needed into the development of norms, the control of variables in experimental situations, the effects of size and “human density” and the influence of bureaucracy. Though we may be anxious to change organizational climate, one thing is clear—social change takes place slowly. To force its growth “out of phase” is to invite unanticipated social consequences. If the nature of social change is to be understood the planners, scientists, technologists need to maintain dialogue with each other. We must create in our society an “open” organizational climate that encourages the human dialogue.

If additional evidence were needed of the connection between food supply and the spread of infectious disease, it would be found in a report recently presented to the Finsbury Borough Council by its Medical Officer of Health, Dr. GEORGE NEWMAN. It appears that in the early part of May a number of cases of scarlet fever were notified to Dr. NEWMAN, and upon inquiry being made it was ascertained that nearly the whole of these cases had partaken of milk from a particular dairy. A most pains‐taking investigation was at once instituted, and the source of the supply was traced to a farm in the Midlands, where two or three persons were found recovering from scarlet fever. The wholesale man in London, to whom the milk was consigned, at first denied that any of this particular supply had been sent to shops in the Finsbury district, but it was eventually discovered that one, or possibly two, churns had been delivered one morning, with the result that a number of persons contracted the disease. One of the most interesting points in Dr. NEWMAN'S report is that three of these cases, occurring in one family, received milk from a person who was not a customer of the wholesale dealer mentioned above. It transpired on the examination of this last retailer's servants that on the particular morning on which the infected churn of milk had been sent into Finsbury, one of them, running short, had borrowed a quart from another milkman, and had immediately delivered it at the house in which these three cases subsequently developed. The quantity he happened to borrow was a portion of the contents of the infected churn.

A detailed review of J. Ennew's The Western Isles Today, published by Cambridge University Press, 1980. The reviewer finds it to be a book that flounders on theoretical, methodical and empirical inadequacies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how rural teachers provided a PLC by leveraging virtual technologies to connect educators of like subject disciplines from several schools, foreign and domestic.

A phenomenological case study-based approach was leveraged to investigate established vPLCs at schools (Creswell, 2013; Stake, 2010). Qualitative data were collected from multiple sources to obtain rural teacher perceptions on the impact vPLCs had on their practice (Creswell, 2013).

Teacher collaborative teams build relationships comparable to teams that met face to face as part of a similar PLC and PD experience. Participant reflections in this investigation showed that rural educators favored face-to-face meetings; however, vPLCs provided similar teacher experiences to that of the face-to-face PBL model. Results indicated that educators recognized virtual collaboration just as valuable a tool for enabling PLCs than face-to-face collaborations while still offering similarities to improved teacher practice.

The research was limited to teachers in rural settings in the USA (Texas) and in the Dominican Republic. The research was limited to teacher perceptions of change, and observed changes as part of their participation in a research-based virtual PLC model. The research was limited to the school setting over an academic year.

The findings from this study have practical implications for rural teachers and school implementation of a professional learning community model.

The promise provided by this study is that vPLCs may provide opportunity for rural schools to provide a job-embedded professional development model (Croft et al., 2010) for otherwise isolated teachers (Barrett et al., 2015).

The classical dichotomy between success and failure is hardly applicable in the analysis of organisational behaviour, performance and outcomes in complex social roles, such as those in education. A unique approach has to be developed. Hence, a threefold classification has been pursued here: unequivocal failure, “satisficing”, and unequivocal success. Although viewed as existing along a continuum, they are marked out by failure and success thresholds. Four basic role climates, transpiring from four basic failure‐success configurations, have been identified and analysed: “apathetic”, “frustrating”, “tense”, and “tranquil” role climates, from which preliminary hypotheses of organisational behaviour have been derived. Application of the analytical framework developed here was restricted to the school principal, a complex role, with many components which are characterised by different and often conflicting role climates. Tentative propositions relating to school principal role climates and organisational behaviour were postulated on the basis of this analytical framework.

Using material from contemporary New Zealand experience as a case study, this paper presents a functional analysis of the organizational problems facing secondary schools, develops a typology of dilemmas posed as a result of these problems, and discusses the manner in which various educational agencies, including the central Department, Teachers' Organizations and the recent Educational Development Conference have attempted to persuade schools to resolve these dilemmas in particular ways. Comments are also made on the internal characteristics of schools which may influence their resolution of these dilemmas in different ways thus leading to a growing heterogeneity within the state educational system.