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Utilising qualitative research methodology, this pilot study of telecottages/business resource centres in South‐east England interviewed 13 centre managers to identify problems, needs, models and ideas that could be related to enterprise televillage development. The research also aimed to improve the quality of management guidance and the long‐term future for these centres. Questions were posed to identify the extent to which centre managers perceived their business strategies to be entrepreneurial and innovative, as they attempted to decrease dependence on public funding by generating additional business income. Emergent strategies, networking, telecommunications and building partnerships with both private and public organisations allowed some centres to expand and to move from total reliance on public funding to a mix of private and public sources of income. Although initial public funding is seen as an important factor in reducing the early vulnerability of business resource centres, the ability of opportunity‐seeking managers to develop an innovative range of services, including a mix of those offered free and those that required fees, was an important factor in survival. Two detailed case studies (private and mixed) are presented as generic prototypes.

It is difficult to replicate evidence-informed models of psychosocial and assertive care interventions in non-research settings, and means to determine workforce capability for psychosocial therapies have not been readily available. The purpose of this paper is to describe and provide a rationale for the Therapy Capability Framework (TCF) which aims to enhance access to, and quality of, evidence-informed practice for consumers of mental health services (MHSs) by strengthening workforce capabilities and leadership for psychosocial therapies.

Guided by literature regarding the inadequacies and inconsistencies of evidence-informed practice provided by publicly-funded MHSs, this descriptive paper details the TCF and its application to enhance leadership and provision of evidence-informed psychosocial therapies within multi-disciplinary teams.

The TCF affords both individual and strategic workforce development opportunities. Applying the TCF as a service-wide workforce strategy may assist publicly-funded mental health leaders, and other speciality health services, establish a culture that values leadership, efficiency, and evidence-informed practice.

This paper introduces the TCF as an innovation to assist publicly-funded mental health leaders to transform standard case management roles to provide more evidence-informed psychosocial therapies. This may have clinical and cost-effective outcomes for public MHSs, the consumers, carers, and family members.

The poor performance of public agricultural extension systems in developing countries engendered interest in pluralistic concepts of extension involving a variety of service providers. Within the reform agenda, modalities relying on private‐sector providers were perceived as a path to improvement. This paper aims to assess the potential and limitations of such modalities.

The paper discusses the conceptual underpinnings of these extension approaches, highlights theoretical and practical challenges inherent in their design, and provides an assessment of several performance‐based case studies described in the formal and informal literature.

Many of the modalities reviewed entail partnerships between the public sector, farmers' organizations or communities, and private‐sector providers. The paper concludes that while private‐sector participation can overcome some of the deficiencies of public extension systems, there are also challenges that have been faced, including misuse of public funds, insufficient accountability to farmers, inequitable provision of service, inadequate quality, and limited coverage of the wide range of farmers' needs.

The review suggests that private‐sector involvement in extension is no panacea. Extension systems need not be uniform, and will require different providers for different clienteles, with public providers and funding focusing more on smaller‐scale and less commercial farmers. The public sector may need to provide some regulatory oversight of private‐sector extension activities, particularly when public funding is involved.

The paper draws conclusions from a diverse range of experiences, some of which are recent, and provides comparative insights. It may be of interest to development scholars and practitioners.

Hong Kong implements a policy for the aging population involving the core themes of “aging in place as the core,” “institutional care as backup” and “continuum of care.” Encouraging elders to live independently at home is a top priority, and elders who are not able to live at home independently are provided with various residential care services, namely Hostels for the Elderly, Homes for the Aged, Care and Attention (C&A) Homes for the Elderly and Nursing Homes (NHs). The purpose of this paper is to analyze the adoption of the publicly funded model of providing residential care services of elderly in Hong Kong.

The paper analyzes the current conundrum encountered by elders in residential care services and makes recommendations. A comprehensive literature review was conducted covering relevant government reports, academics' journal papers and nongovernmental organizations’ reports concerning residential care service of elderly from 1965 to present.

Subsidized residential care homes for the elderly (RCHEs) clearly outperform private RCHEs in terms of space and staff provisions, but the supply of subsidized RCHEs cannot meet the demand. Hence, between 2007 and 2018, the average waiting time was 33 months for NHs and that for C&A homes was 23 months. Several viable measures to meet the demand are purchasing Enhanced Bought Place Schemes (EBPSs) from private RCHEs, subsidizing elders who opt for living in private RCHEs by providing them with Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA) and residential care service voucher (RCSV) and subsidizing elderly applicants who opt for living in RCHEs in Guangdong. However, these viable measures are problematic because of the inadequate quality of EBPSs and private RCHEs, which is attributed to the costing arrangement of public and private RCHEs that were established in the colonial period. The brief history of RCHEs also indicates a deviation from the original policy aim, namely aging in place, which was introduced in the Green Paper on Services for the Elderly in 1977.

The supply and quality of community and home care services should be thoroughly examined; effective community and home care services can prevent and even delay unnecessary institutionalization. Another complementary solution is to devise a long-term plan for residential care services. To address disparities in quality standards in different RCHEs, adopting the combination of punitive and compliance models such as conducting frequent inspections and implementing an accreditation system for private RCHEs is imperative.

Although the principle of “aging in place” originated in 1977, the institutionalization rate 6.8% of elders was unexpectedly high in Hong Kong and even surpassed the Asian counterparts. It necessities to rethink how to implement policy concerning long-term care services of elders.

This article analyses community care services (CCS) in terms of availability, awareness, accessibility, and acceptance (the Four A’s approach), untangles the deep-seated factors underlying the CCS and provides some short-term, medium-term, and long-term recommendations.

A literature review was conducted, including relevant government reports, consultation papers, Legislative Council papers and articles from academic journals from 1980 to the present.

The Four A’s approach shows that applicants to both centre-based services and home-based services endure lengthy waiting times because of the limited number of CCS. Furthermore, the awareness of day respite services is approximately 50 percent, which lags behind other CCS. Accessibility is contingent on a cross-district day respite service system and a lack of consistency between the quota and the proportion of older adults in the districts. Finally, the level of service provided by CCS is unsatisfactory due to inflexible service provision. Reviewing the brief history of long-term care services (LTC) reveals the deep-seated factors at the core of their heavy reliance on the subvention model, in contrast to the adoption of the ‘mixed economy of care’ by residential care services (RCS). An imbalance in budget allocation to RCS and CCS is also revealed.

Although the principle of ‘ageing in place’ was introduced in 1977, the institutionalisation rate (6.8 percent) of older adults remains unexpectedly high in Hong Kong, even surpassing its Asian counterparts, whereas the usage rate of CCS hovers around 0.8 percent. Thus, how to implement policy concerning LTC services for older adults must be re-evaluated.

The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the most recent literature concerning document supply and related matters.

The reading of over 140 published works, including journals, monographs, reports and web sites.

Finds that usage statistics are still not giving a clear indication of the importance of document supply, but it is confirmed that the large proportion of demand comes from a small number of titles. Open access continues to be top news, in particular the mass digitisation of books. Quite a lot on document supply – Kuwait, USA, Germany, Norway, UK and South Africa.

Provides a useful source of information for librarians and others interested in document supply and related matters.

The internationalisation of industries has spilled over to academia, whereby institutions of higher learning (IHL) increasingly compete in the graduate quality and applied graduate knowledge capabilities that they can offer. With increasing global competition for students, combined with the evolving need for lifelong learning in dynamic industries impacted by digital knowledge management, there is an opportunity for IHLs to be able to evolve to ensure their business models enable services and service delivery to cater to and help shape industry demands. This chapter will look at micro-credentialing (MC) and how the provision of MCs has changed along with the evolving IHL education environment. The demands of students, employers and ecosystem considerations will be addressed through a review of the current landscape, pathways to MC and how MC may be operationalised. The Bersteinian approach to pedagogic classification, which identifies the framework of knowledge as being communicable via three axes of singularism, regionalism and a wider generalist approach is referenced as a framework. The resultant recommendations that draw upon these foundations will conclude the chapter.

The workforce management model conceptualised for the effective management of the construction workforce was subjected to expert scrutiny to determine the suitability and applicability of the identified practices and their attributed variables to the construction industry. In achieving this, a Delphi approach was adopted using experts from construction organisations in South Africa. These experts comprised workforce management personnel and construction professionals in senior management positions. The data were analysed using appropriate statistical tools such as interquartile deviation, Kendell’s coefficient of concordance, and chi square to determine consensus among these experts. After a two-round Delphi, the seven constructs proposed in the conceptualised workforce management model were adjudged to be important and worthy of adoption by construction organisations seeking to improve workforce management in the current fourth industrial revolution era.