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National and local policy supports the involvement of patients at all levels in the design, delivery and improvement of health services. Whilst existing approaches to support involvement have been described and disseminated, including the 4Pi National Involvement Standards, their application in quality improvement is rarely reported. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

A quality improvement initiative within a mental health trust was developed with a multi-disciplinary team, including those with professional experience of delivering or improving care and those with lived experience. The aim of the initiative was to improve the physical health of inpatients within an acute mental health unit. This case study aims to describe how the integration of concepts from the 4Pi National Involvement Standards (Principles, Purpose, Presence, Process and Impact) provided a framework for engaging and involving service users. The case study also aims to describe how co-design was included within the 4Pi approach and supported the development of a tool to aid improving physical healthcare.

The 4Pi National Involvement Standards provided a guiding framework for the involvement of service users within a quality improvement initiative. Value of the approach was realised through the co-design of a tool developed by service users, along with healthcare professionals, to facilitate discussion and support shared-decision making about inpatients’ physical health.

Identifying “ways that work” for service user involvement is crucial to move beyond the policy rhetoric or tokenistic involvement. Involvement in quality improvement initiatives can bring benefits both to services and the service users themselves.

Whilst the 4PI approach is recognised as a useful framework for involvement, few examples exist of its practical applications within a quality improvement setting.

This column reviews reference works in all areas of science and technology, except medicine, and includes new publications as well as editions of previously published works. The intention is to provide informative, critical and evaluative reviews and to make comparisons with other similar works, if available. It is hoped that these reviews may be of use both in collection development and in providing reference services.

We provide seven steps to integrating sustainability into strategy and operations. The process is designed to enable business leaders to reframe sustainability as a source of value creation using a life cycle collaborative approach to innovation instead of piecemeal change led by small groups of experts. Furthermore, the approach builds on the strengths of whole business systems rather than attempting to fix the weaknesses of individual actors as is typical of many strategy execution efforts. The chapter begins with a survey of perceptions about the meaning of sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR). The survey shows both significant confusion about the concepts themselves, and an opportunity for first movers to differentiate themselves by adopting an approach to sustainability based on innovation and business value. The seven steps are then presented using a strength-based whole system approach to compress the time and resources required to achieve the desired results.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a profile of Rachel Taylor.

Rachel provides a short biographical account and is then interviewed by Jerome. In the biography the search for happiness and belonging is discussed.

Rachel talks about focusing on what we are good at, what we love and how discovery can light that spark of hope that there can be better than what has gone before.

Rachel’s story shows the potential that lies not just within some of us, but all of us. It is but one story, but its message is sure to touch many.

How do services promote hope and build resilience and wellbeing? While another service user said recovery was about “coping with your illness and having a meaningful life” (McManus et al., 2009), services have perhaps focused too much on symptom reduction and not enough on helping people find meaning and purpose.

Rachel asks the question is Positive Psychology a movement for all or is it just for the elite?

Rachel is someone who has discovered for herself the benefits of Positive Psychology. Hopefully Rachel’s own discovery will lead to bringing this promising approach to people with mental health problems.

In order to emphasize in-depth analyses of individual life stories, seven informants were selected. Since breadth of experience will contribute to a more detailed contextualization of the consumer's use of products in identity negotiation, diversity across informants was emphasized. Interviews generally followed the format as suggested by Thompson, Locander, and Pollio (1989). A comfortable setting was chosen and pseudonyms were used to ensure anonymity. Interviews were audio-taped and lasted anywhere from one to just over two hours. Grand tour questions (McCracken, 1988) focused on the meaning of the tattoo design, the experience of being tattooed, perceptions of the body, words the informants used to describe themselves, and other biographical information important for understanding the informant's personal myth. Every effort was made to present a natural front, keep the informant on track without being too directive, demonstrate active listening, and prompt the informant as a way of probing for details (Spradley, 1979). To ensure accuracy, an experienced and trained transcriptionist transcribed each of the seven interviews. The final text totaled 450 typed double-spaced pages.

Shell Research & Technology Centre, Thornton, located just outside Chester in the North of England, is home to over 700 research staff. Its brief is to service the research needs of any part of Shell that is willing to sponsor a research project and work is undertaken in a wide range of areas, including the technologies associated with fuels, lubricants, additives, engineering and the environment. The Centre also blends the fuels and lubricants used by Michael Schumacher and the Ferrari F1 Team.

We began this chapter with storied experiences of relationships with children and youth and of questions around tensions they can experience as they make home, familial, community, and school transitions. These questions included: Why do we do it this way? Who decides? Can’t I think about what's best for my child? For Aboriginal children? As Khea, Jennifer, and Brenda Mary storied the experiences noted earlier, and as we collectively inquired into their stories, attentive to the intergenerational narrative reverberations of colonization made visible, it was their attentiveness to the particular life of a youth, Robbie; of a child, Rachel; and of a grandchild that we were first drawn. Their deep yearnings for something different in schools also turned our attention toward the counterstories to live by which they were composing. Across Khea's, Jennifer's, and Brenda Mary's earlier storied experiences the counterstories to live by around which they were threading new possible intergenerational narrative reverberations were focused on understanding children and youth as composing lives shaped by multiple contexts, that is, lives shaped through multiple relationships in places in and outside of school. This need for understanding the multiple places and relationships shaping the lives of children and youth as they enter into schools is, as shown in the earlier noted stories, vital in Aboriginal families and communities given the ways in which the narrative of colonization continues to reverberate in present lives.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to retell the narratives of a preservice teacher and a teacher educator as they lived a story of critical literacy and curriculum-making as a curriculum of lives.

Approach – The chapter presents a year-long narrative inquiry centered on the revisioning of curriculum for an undergraduate literacy course for preservice teachers.

Findings – The researcher broadened her understanding of teacher and teacher educators as curriculum makers to include preservice teachers as curriculum makers. As preservice teachers in the literacy course were invited to reflect on their own literacy backgrounds, several crucial narratives emerged that shaped new understandings for the researcher/teacher educator and drew her into her own curriculum-making with moral purpose. One preservice teacher began a journey of narrative authority and curriculum-making as a curriculum of lives in a subsequent field experience, even through the mire of political pressure in schools.

Research implications – The preservice teacher's retelling featured children who discovered newfound understandings of social justice through literary ways of knowing and critical literacy events. She developed new understandings of how to help public school students value and define their literacies and their life events, all of which folded back into the undergraduate literacy course.

Value – Teacher educators can be encouraged to walk in relationship with their preservice teachers, valuing human experiences and lives as curriculum rather than relenting to top-down, politically driven, outside curriculum.

Within the agri-food sectors of Western countries, there is an increasing interest in alternative food, i.e., organic, local and regional food, artisanal food, short-supply chains, slow food etc. Innovation in food processing is a significant element both in alternative food and conventional food strategies. Alternatives are based on competition on qualities rather than price. A main question in this chapter is to address how alternative qualities are embedded into food products? This question is explored using a study of two alternative cases within the dairy sectors of Norway and Wales. A model of the different modes of designed qualities of food is developed and discussed to explore the complex issue of quality. We find space and technology especially relevant as dimensions of qualities. Our conclusion is that there is a need to nuance the discussion about quality and food. Firms may develop as hybrids within a conventional vs. alternative perspective, and a strong emphasis on the conventional and alternative as a dichotomy tends to give a static and restrictive perspective.