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Applied psychology interventions have an important role to play in mental and physical health services with offenders and in reducing re‐offending. There has been a significant growth of the evidence on the effectiveness of specific interventions. Barriers still exist to delivering effective psychological interventions.Psychological interventions also have a key role in comprehensive, accessible services with offenders in relation to long‐term disorders as well as co‐morbid problems. Until 2000 offenders were largely excluded from mainstream health and social care provision. Very significant progress has been made in this respect. The provision of mainstream psychological therapies had until recently lagged behind other areas of health care. As a result, Applied Psychology Group (APG) has developed a new strategy, with a shift of emphasis towards strategic development of psychological interventions ‐ away from a primary focus on psychologists, to psychology and its applications.This paper outlines recent developments designed to ensure delivery of high‐quality psychological interventions in Health and Offender Partnerships.

It is widely acknowledged that there is a significant gap between the demand for psychological therapy services and the supply (Bower & Gilbody, 2005). It is also well‐known that the health needs of people with learning disabilities are typically greater than those of the rest of the population, and that they are more likely to experience mental health problems and psychological distress (Lindsey, 2002). Difficulties in accessing psychological therapy services and long waiting times have been commonplace in recent years (Richards et al, 2003). Current moves towards modernising the NHS have led to increased accountability and competition between health providers, and many providers of psychological services have tried to increase their accessibility, effectiveness and efficiency. Adaptations to referral pathways and service delivery models in psychological care services have made changes to how clients access services and the input they receive. Accessible services, employing collaborative and stepped care models, have been identified as effective in delivering services in ways which best meet the needs of individuals and maximise the efficient use of resources (Bower & Gilbody, 2005). In our local psychology service for adults with learning disabilities, we have attempted to develop service delivery strategies and modernise referral routes so that services can be delivered which better meet the needs of our client group by optimising accessibility, efficiency and effectiveness.

Despite the emergence of NICE guidelines regarding the effectiveness and appropriateness of psychological therapies for the majority of common mental health problems, access to these services is still dramatically underdeveloped and uneven. Estimates of untreated problems such as depression and anxiety in primary care signal the extent of these problems and the scale of investment in new services, if these needs are to be adequately met in the future.The Department of Health's and the Care Services Improvement Partnership's (CSIP) Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme sets out a framework and a series of co‐ordinated actions, including two national demonstration sites, to begin to address these issues in England.This paper examines the origins and policy drivers that have given rise to the IAPT programme, outlines the progress to date and specifically assesses the implications for the mental health workforce of this programme. Issues addressed include the workforce profiles of existing services, career frameworks for psychological therapists, the capacity of training providers to train new and existing staff in psychological therapies and the challenges implicit in devising a workforce delivery plan to support the IAPT programme.

Various digital banking platforms (website and apps) are offered to bank customers in order to create an experiential service, which is essential in retaining customers and generating brand bank loyalty. The current study aims to examine the dynamics of customer emotional experience generated during digital banking service delivery and investigate the effect of customer psychological engagement with various digital platform types on brand bank loyalty creation.

A conceptual framework was constructed. Data were collected from digital banking customers through a web-based survey conducted via an online Internet panel. It involved 502 participants. The study employs a path analysis method using structural equation modeling.

The empirical results suggest that there are two paths from emotional attachment to bank loyalty: a direct path and an indirect path shaped by customer psychological engagement with service platforms. Additionally, it was found that the digital platform (website vs apps) used by the customer determined the magnitude of the impact of emotional attachment to the bank on psychological engagement with service platforms.

This research claims that features of digital banking services are sufficient to enhance affective brand responses and maintain long-lasting relationships with customers. Using experiential services and psychologically engaging the customers, this goal can be achieved. Additionally, well designed apps can improve interaction with services and subsequently enhance loyalty.

This study facilitates a better understanding of the customer's emotional–psychological state during engagement with digital service delivery. Its novelty and contribution to the literature focus on the notion that the impact of emotional attachment on bank loyalty is mediated by experiential psychological engagement with the digital platform and moderated by the type of digital platform used.

Service encounters are becoming increasingly virtual through the infusion of computer-mediated technologies. Virtual services separate consumers and service providers both spatially and temporally. With the advent of virtual services is the need to theoretically explain how service separability is psychologically perceived by consumers across the spectrum of computer-mediated technologies. Drawing on construal-level theory, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a theoretical framework depicting consumer’s construal of spatial and temporal separation across a continuum of technology-mediated service virtuality.

The authors conducted two studies: first, to investigate consumers’ levels of mental construal associated with varying degrees of service separation across a spectrum of technology-mediated services; second, to empirically examine consumer evaluations of service quality in response to varying degrees of spatial and temporal service separation. These relationships were tested across two service industries: education and tourism.

Consumers mentally construe psychological distance in response to service separation and these observations vary across the spectrum of service offerings ranging from face-to-face (no psychological distance) through to virtual (spatially and temporally separated – high psychological distance) services. Further, spatial separation negatively affects consumers’ service evaluations; such that as service separation increases, consumers’ service evaluations decrease. No such significant findings support the similar effect of temporal separation on customer service evaluations. Moreover, specific service industry-based distances exist such that consumers responded differentially for a credence (education) vs an experiential (tourism) service.

Recent studies in services marketing have challenged the inseparability assumption inherent for services. This paper builds on this knowledge and is the first to integrate literature on construal-level theory, service separability, and virtual services into a holistic conceptual framework which explains variance in consumer evaluations of separated service encounters. This is important due to the increasingly virtual nature of service provider-customer interactions across a diverse range of service industries (i.e. banking and finance, tourism, education, and health care). Service providers must be cognisant of the psychological barriers which are imposed by increased technology infusion in virtual services.

The inherent characteristics of professional services (i.e. high in credence properties, customized and featuring information asymmetry) often cause difficulties for clients to confidently evaluate technical outcomes before, during or even after service delivery. This results in considerable client psychological discomfort. This study aims to blend a revised social interaction model and uncertainty reduction theory to investigate the role that service provider’s interpersonal communication style plays in establishing client psychological comfort and satisfaction in a health-care context.

The study draws on cross-sectional data collected from 355 hospital patients following visiting a physician plus an experimental design in an Eastern culture (Thailand).

The study reveals three key findings. First, an affiliative communication style is positively associated with psychological comfort, but not so a dominant communications style. When both styles are presented, the high-affiliative style overshadows the low-dominant style and creates the highest psychological comfort. Second, clients’ perceptions of professional’s affiliative and dominant styles influence psychological comfort differentially under varying conditions of clients’ cognitive social capital, collectivist value-orientation but not service criticality. Third, a competing model suggests psychological comfort acts as a partial mediator between affiliative communication style and satisfaction.

To generalize the findings, further studies might be conducted in other professional services and in individualist Western cultures.

The findings have important managerial implications for the appropriate use of communication style to build psychological comfort and engage clients of professional services firms.

The findings shed light on the important role of an everyday social function – interpersonal communications and how this impacts client psychological comfort and satisfaction.

This is one of the few studies in a services context that examines the impact of professionals’ communications style. Moreover, it examines the impact of cultural value-orientation, cognitive social capital, service criticality in moderating the communications style – client psychological comfort relationship.

The purpose of this paper, taking banking as the research object, is to build up a psychology covenant model for service enterprises and customers and to seek the form of the construction dimension in the psychology covenant between the service enterprise and the customer.

SPSS16.0 was used for the exploratory factor analysis and AMOS7.0 for the confirmatory factor analysis.

The psychological contract between service enterprises and customers is composed of two‐dimensional structures: the transactional psychological contract and the relational psychological contract.

The biggest limitation of this paper is the research region being limited to banking. Future research can extend to other industries.

The result has the theoretic reference to the tactic establishment for customer relationship management in China's service industry against the background of a transfer economy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the theory that dissatisfaction and violation are distinct affective responses to a service wait. It was thought that dissatisfaction was a consequence of a disconfirmation of expectations while violation was a consequence of a breach of a psychological contract.

The study used the critical incidents method to examine 144 consumption stories where an informant experienced a wait in a service situation.

It was found that consumers generally felt disappointed or dissatisfied when they experienced a wait when they had expectations about waiting time. When they believed that service provider had made concrete representations (or promises) about the length of time it would take to deliver a service, they felt angry or outraged. These are elements of the overall affective state of violation.

The critical incidents technique is well used in services marketing and rich theory building method of investigation. It has known limitations. In addition to explaining reaction to waits and delays, the application of psychological contract theory might apply to a host of marketing phenomena and the theory explains why some consumers get frustrated and angry while others are merely dissatisfied.

There are two significant contributions of this paper. First, the psychological contract exists in service marketing situations and that the psychological contract is different from consumer expectations about the service encounter. Second, dissatisfaction is distinct from violation as violation is a strong emotional response to breach of the psychological contract in the service encounter.

Evidence-based psychological therapies are available for severe and enduring mental health problems, but resources and access to these are limited within England. Practitioners in community mental health teams (CMHTs) can act as gatekeepers for access to psychological therapies for those in secondary care, but little is known about how they make referral decisions. This paper aims to understand how CMHT practitioners make decisions about who to refer or not, to secondary care psychological therapy services (PTS).

A total of 11 CMHT practitioners were interviewed to understand the decision making processes underpinning their referrals or otherwise, to a PTS within NHS England. The data were analysed qualitatively using thematic analysis.

Thematic analysis resulted in 11 sub-themes under three main themes of the self, the organisation and wider structure and the service user. Results indicated that some participants were referred automatically for psychological therapy if a service user asked or if there was external pressure to refer, while others’ decisions were informed by contextual information such as the service user’s ability to engage or change, risk status and limited organisational resources.

This study explores the decision making of multi-disciplinary professionals referring to PTS. The findings have important implications for understanding some of the factors that can influence patient access to psychological treatment in secondary care.

This paper presents a case study of the leadership of applied psychological services in prisons and probation services. The history and process of achieving management change with this professional group in the context of broader public sector reforms are considered in detail.