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The purpose of this paper is to explore the way diverse family forms are depicted in recent TV advertisements, and how the ads may be read as an indication of contemporary attitudes to food. It focuses particularly on consumers’ ambivalent attitude towards convenience foods given the way these foods are moralised within a highly gendered discourse of “feeding the family”.

The paper presents a critical reading of the advertisments and their complex meanings for diverse audiences, real and imagined. The latter part of the paper draws on the results of ethnographically-informed fieldwork in the north of England.

The research highlights the value of food as a lens on contemporary family life. It challenges the conventional distinction between convenience and care, arguing that convenience food can be used as an expression of care.

The paper makes limited inferences about audiencing processes in the absence of direct empirical evidence.

The paper’s value lies in its original interpretation of TV food advertising within the context of contemporary family life and in the novel connections that are drawn between convenience and care.

Today, hospitals not only have to contend with the dynamics of regulation and market forces but most importantly “service quality”. Service quality is a measure of how well the total service package meets customers’ expectations. The abilities to identify and prioritize customers’ expectations and to perform existing process assessment are important elements of a successful quality improvement strategy. The inherent characteristics of services complicate the efforts for quality improvement. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a systematic technique for designing services or products that are based on customers’ expectations. Given the proven success of QFD in manufacturing, this paper explores the applicability of QFD in health care. It describes the QFD technique and how it leads to a better understanding of customers’ expectations. It presents recommendations and a generic framework that is supported by empirical findings as a reference model for hospitals.

This is an account of a training course consisting of six three‐hourly sessions held in 1989. Sixteen attended the course, all supervisors from a variety of disciplines. The majority were over 40 years old and with more than 15 years service with the company. Greene King Employee Relations Adviser, Rod McAlpine, and Training and Safety Manager, Peter Jackson, felt the need to develop a more formalised training programme at supervisory level and a first series in interpersonal skills was thought to be appropriate. At the same time Relate, formerly the Marriage Guidance Council, was extending its educational and training areas in the Eastern region. Greene King took advantage of this to use them in the organising, actioning and planning of the course. The article consists of two sections, the first written by Rod McAlpine and Peter Jackson giving background details of the company and its training requirements. The second is the work of Mary Pennock, Relate Training Organiser in West Suffolk. In it she recounts how Relate approached what is a logical but comparatively recent extension of their activities. It also covers the details of the course which was designed and packaged for Greene King, bearing in mind the background of those taking part and the particular needs of the company.

Whistleblowing is a procedure where an existing or past participant of an establishment reveals actions and practices believed to be illegal, immoral or corrupt, by individuals who can influence change. Whistleblowing is an important means of recognising quality and safety matters in the health-care system. The aim of this study is to undergo a literature review exploring perceived barriers of whistleblowing in health care among health-care professionals of all grades and the possible influences on the whistleblower.

An integrative review of both quantitative and qualitative studies published between 2000 and 2020 was undertaken using the following databases: CINAHL Plus, Embase, Google Scholar, Medline and Scopus. The primary search terms were “whistleblowing” and “barriers to whistleblowing”. The quality of the included studies was appraised using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme criteria. The authors followed preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis (Prisma) in designing the research and also reporting.

A total of 11 peer-reviewed articles were included. Included papers were analysed using constant comparative analysis. The review identified three broad themes (cultural, organisational and individual) factors as having a significant influence on whistleblowing reporting among health-care professionals.

This study points out that fear is predominantly an existing barrier causing individuals to hesitate to report wrongdoing in care and further highlights the significance of increasing an ethos of trust and honesty within health care.

The purpose of this paper is to review existing research on whistleblowing in healthcare in order to develop an evidence base for policy and research.

A narrative review, based on systematic literature protocols developed within the management field.

The authors identify valuable insights on the factors that influence healthcare whistleblowing, and how organizations respond, but also substantial gaps in the coverage of the literature, which is overly focused on nursing, has been largely carried out in the UK and Australia, and concentrates on the earlier stages of the whistleblowing process.

The review identifies gaps in the literature on whistleblowing in healthcare, but also draws attention to an unhelpful lack of connection with the much larger mainstream literature on whistleblowing.

Despite the limitations to the existing literature important implications for practice can be identified, including enhancing employees’ sense of security and providing ethics training.

This paper provides a platform for future research on whistleblowing in healthcare, at a time when policymakers are increasingly aware of its role in ensuring patient safety and care quality.

Argues that audit in gynaecology must achieve improvement in the quality of the service provided or the resources spent on the audit process will be wasted. Setting up audit requires a lead person, time commitment, the involvement of all relevant staff and information. There must be willingness to make changes and a management structure which will allow this to happen.

Quality, it has been said, is being ‘used in a bewilderingly promiscuous way’ in professional health care (Pollitt, 1993:162). Its ‘infinite variety’ of forms is now associated with all aspects of the health care enterprise, from inputs and processes to outputs and outcomes (ibid).

William (“Bill”) De Friez and Veronica (“Ronni”) McCarthy own and operate Raconteur Film and Television Productions located in downtown Christchurch. Bill serves as part-time director; his full-time position is faculty lecturer in the Film Department of the University of Canterbury. Ronni is the full-time producer for their small business operation that completes an average of three documentaries per year as well as a network children℉s series and other special projects. She won the prestigious Winston Churchill Fellowship in 1995 to study children℉s television outside of New Zealand.

The aim of this paper is to scan the evidence and to make sense of the processes underpinning the maintenance of care standards and the meaning and significance of whistleblowing in the available literature. It formed part of a project examining attitudes to whistleblowing in the care of older people in Wales. The paper focusses on the actions of employees within organizations (such as hospitals or domiciliary care organizations) or professional groups (such as nurses and doctors) but does not include reference to whistleblowing or the raising of concerns by members of the public (such as relatives or patients).

–Published literature concerning whistleblowing in the UK and internationally was considered. Health and social care databases were searched (including PubMed, MEDLINE, CINAHL, BNI, PsychLit, ERIC) and a wide variety of opinion pieces, research and theoretical explorations were accessed. Additionally, because whistleblowing occurs in workplaces other than health and social care, databases in the humanities, law and business were also searched. Other useful documents included public inquiry reports on matters both of public concern occurring in health and social care (e.g. The Shipman Inquiry, The Bristol Inquiry) as well as inquiries into events outside of this sector where whistleblowing was significant.

–There is no widely accepted theoretical framework or universally accepted conceptual underpinning for whistleblowing in the literature. This paper reveals various associated meanings, but all sources agree that whistleblowing is an imposed, rather than a chosen, situation and that whistleblowers are usually ordinary people who become aware of negative situations forcing them into a decision to remain silent, or to speak out. Another area of agreement within the literature is that the term whistleblowing has attracted overwhelmingly negative connotations. The simple choice between taking action or remaining silent belies the complexity of workplace cultures; including the care of older people.

–The paper explores a range of published sources from health care as well as other sectors. Although whistleblowing has been recognized as making an important contribution to patient safety, and the saving of lives, it has also had a somewhat tortured history in the health and social care sector, as well as in other industries. This paper explores whistleblowing in the context of recent UK policy developments and suggests the need for workplace cultures to be better understood; as well as promotion of open communication regarding concerns or unsafe practices.

The purpose of this paper is to recommend print and electronic resources that will be useful in helping the student, scholar or thesis writer who wants to begin an in-depth literature search for criticism of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Listings are geared toward the English-speaking, North American user, but include some European sources as well.

Recommendations are based on the author’s experience as a scholar, editor and thesis advisor in the field of Tolkien studies.

While the use of general literature reference sources will satisfy most needs, a serious scholar will need to look beyond the Modern Language Association (MLA) and similar resources to do a comprehensive search of the literature.

This is not a topic covered in reference reviews, previously.