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Research has long focused on the notion of access and the trajectory towards a healthcare encounter but has neglected what happens to patients after these initial encounters. This paper focuses attention on what happens after an initial healthcare encounter leading to a more nuanced understanding of how patients from a diverse range of backgrounds make sense of medical advice, how they mix this knowledge with other forms of information and how they make decisions about what to do next.

Drawing on 160 in-depth interviews across four European countries the paper problematizes the notion of access; expands the definition of “decision partners”; and reframes the medical encounter as a journey, where one encounter leads to and informs the next.

This approach reveals the significant unseen, unrecognised and unacknowledged work that patients undertake to solve their health concerns.

De-centring the professional from the healthcare encounter allows us to understand why patients take particular pathways to care and how resources might be more appropriately leveraged to support both patients and professionals along this journey.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology for critical welfare practice research, “recollection-as-method”, and to use this to demonstrate the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The paper analyses a series of personal recollections from the author’s experiences of academic life and welfare work to establish a methodology for critical welfare practice research. This uses concepts memory, dirty work, shame and complicity, and is grounded in critical feminist and critical race work, and psychosocial and socio-cultural approaches to governance.

The paper establishes a methodology for critical welfare practice research by demonstrating the significance of using an ontologically driven approach to governance, to achieve a realistic and complex understanding of statutory welfare work.

Recollections are post hoc narrations, written in the present day. The ethics and robustness of this approach are deliberated in the paper.

The focus of the paper is on statutory welfare practice that involves the assessment and regulation of homeless people. Principles and arguments developed in this paper contribute to reflective and reflexive debates across “front-line” social welfare practice fields in and beyond homelessness. Examples include assessment of social groups such as unemployed people, refugees and asylum seekers. Arguments also have application for criminal justice settings such as for prison work.

This foregrounds practitioner ambivalence and resistance in order to theorise the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The recollection-as-method approach provides a methodology for critical practice research by demonstrating an alternative way to understand the realities of welfare work. It argues that understanding how resistance and complicity operate in less conscious and more structural ways is important for understanding the social relations of social welfare institutions and the role of good/bad feeling for these processes. This is important for understanding interventions required for anti-oppressive social change across the social worlds of policy-practice life.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a recent experiment in research coproduction in an evaluation of service planning at a London Mental Health NHS Trust. The paper aims to consider whether members of the research team who have themselves been users of mental health services are able to contribute to the research process as “experts by experience”, or if their experiential knowledge is “colonized” within the academic research team.

A qualitative, comparative case study approach was adopted, using structured observations and semi‐structured interviews. Researchers' reflective accounts and a reflective focus group were employed to explore the process of coproduction.

The paper concludes that, far from “colonising” expertise by experience, the experiment builds local capacity in research coproduction and usefully informs a service planning process that reflects the priorities and concerns of a range of stakeholders.

The paper describes a small, local experiment in research coproduction and so findings are limited in their scope. However, the study demonstrates an effective methodological approach to evaluating, empirically, the impact of coproduction on the health services research (HSR) process.

The paper demonstrates the potential for repeated exercises in coproduction to build capacity in collaborative approaches to both HSR and service planning.

The involvement of experts by experience is increasingly a policy requirement in the domains of both health service planning and HSR in the UK. There are very few empirical studies that evaluate the impact of that coproduction.

I enclose a letter |published below. Ed.| written in reply to an article in your journal “Libraries and Education in Black South Africa”.

MANY and various are the problems both of finance and administration, but usually the more pressing of finance, connected with the establishment and maintenance of Branch libraries. It is the more surprising that the subject has been very little discussed or written about. If not looking too far ahead, I would suggest to the Council of the Library Association, and more especially the Publications Committee, that the topic be taken up at the next but one Annual Meeting, and that two whole days might very well be devoted to its consideration.

Just a hundred years ago great developments were pending in this country in matters relating to health and to the diagnosis and treatment of disease. It was in 1852 that Pasteur began his epoch‐making researches on the subject of bacterial fermentation. At about the same time the ophthalmoscope was introduced. In 1854 Florence Nightingale was busy demanding reforms in nursing, and in 1855 the hypodermic syringe was invented. In 1858 a register of qualified dentists was established for the first time. But the years 1851 to 1854 were remarkable also for the institution and prosecution for the first time in British history of an active campaign for the suppression of the adulteration of food. There was little knowledge of this subject and almost no laws, with two minor exceptions. It was nominally an offence under a statute of George IV to adulterate bread with alum—but no public official had any duty to enforce it. Also, there were certain Revenue Acts, enforceable by the Customs and Excise Department, which in the interests of the Revenue, not of consumers, forbade the adulteration of certain excisable articles of food. But the machinery of the Department was clumsy and inefficient. To two far‐seeing and very courageous men is due the credit for the overdue enactment in 1860 of legislation intended to protect the public from the wholesale adulteration which was rampant a hundred years ago. One was Thomas Wakley, F.R.C.S., Editor of The Lancet. Wakley in 1851 appointed an Analytical and Sanitary Commission, with Dr. A. H. Hassall, M.D., M.R.C.P., as Chief Analyst, to make investigations on a large scale, and promised that the results would be published in his journal, which would announce also the names and addresses of retailers, and of manufacturers when known, of all articles found to be adulterated. A great number of these reports appeared in The Lancet from 1851 to 1854, and were afterwards reprinted in a book by Dr. Hassall. They threw much light on many black spots. The first subject to be tackled was coffee, which was almost invariably adulterated with chicory. Analytical chemists until then had stated that it was impossible for them to detect the adulteration in their laboratories. But Dr. Hassall was a skilled microscopist, as well as a chemist and a doctor. He was the first person in this country to “ apply regularly and systematically the powers of the microscope to the elucidation of the subject of adulteration ”. He was able to detect by his microscope flagrant and widespread adulteration of the following, among many other, foods :—

This paper aims to engage with the cinematic history of Australian education by examining the historical representation of secondary schools in two Australian feature films of the 1970s: Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975) and The Getting of Wisdom (Beresford, 1977). By what narrative strategies, metaphors and understandings were Australian high schools encoded into images and how might these interpretations differ from written accounts of the secondary schools? The discussion focuses on the social and material worlds of the schools. It reflects on the types of education depicted and the characterisations of teachers and students, including consideration of gender, class, and sexualities. The paper asks: what was the historical understanding of secondary schools that made them so attractive for cinematic explorations of Australian national identity in the 1970s?

The concept of recovery is well accepted internationally as a guiding vision for mental health services. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the challenges faced by in-home psychiatric support workers in implementing this vision in their work with clients with severe psychiatric disability.

The findings reported here are based on interviews with 27 support workers and ten managers of organisations providing support services. These were collected as part of evaluations of two supported housing programmes carried out between 2010 and 2011.

Challenges faced by support workers coalesced around two areas: first, balancing the need to provide care with the need to promote autonomy and second, developing an effective working relationship while working mainly within a clients’ home.

These challenges for support workers highlight tensions within the recovery vision that are not easily resolved. To ensure high quality, recovery-oriented care services are provided, support workers need access to training courses that focus on challenging areas of this work and should be provided with regular professional supervision.

Existing literature on support workers has generally focused on the nature of the role and support worker interactions with other health workers. In this paper, the authors highlight difficulties faced by support workers in implementing the vision of recovery in their work. The paper provides important information for policy makers and managers who are designing service delivery systems that aim to promote recovery.

This paper explores how ethnicity is implicated in an etic–emic understanding through day-to-day practices and how such practices meet external accountability demands. Addressing the broader question of how ethnicity presents in an accounting situation, it examines the mundane level responses to those accountability demands manifesting an operationalisation of the ethnicity of the people who make those responses.

The study followed ethnomethodology principles whereby one of the researchers acted both as an active member and as a researcher within a Salvation Army congregation in Manchester (UK), while the others acted as post-fieldwork reflectors.

The conceivers and guardians of an accountability system relating to the Zimbabwean-Mancunian Salvationist congregation see account giving practices as they appear (etic), not as they are thought and interiorised (emic). An etic–emic misunderstanding on both sides occurs in the situation of a practice variation in a formal accountability system. This is due to the collision of one ethnic group's emics with the emics of conceivers. Such day-to-day practices are thus shaped by ethnic orientations of the participants who operationalise the meeting of accountability demands. Hence, while ethnicity is operationalised in emic terms, accounting is seen as an etic construct. Possible variations between etic requirements and emic practices can realise this operationalisation.

The authors’ findings were based on one ethnic group's emic construction of accountability. Further research may extend this to multi-ethnic settings with multiple etic/emic combinations.

This study contributed to the debate on both epistemological and methodological issues in accountability. As it is ill-defined or neglected in the literature, the authors offer a working conceptualisation of ethnicity – an operating cultural unit being implicated in both accounting and accountability.

Farmers markets act as a nexus between farmers, community members and social values, and can foster significant community and environmental benefits. However, some of these benefits, including agricultural sustainability, are rarely measured or publicized, restricting the full potential of markets and their associated actors to generate public benefits. This study aims to consider how markets, planners and policymakers might address this gap to promote a healthy environment and climate change mitigation.

In this article, the authors discuss their efforts to advance the above opportunity by developing, in collaboration with 20 farms across the USA, a citizen science data collection tool that measures and translates farm “ecosystem services” into accessible, public-facing formats to support informed farmer and consumer decision-making.

The authors present takeaways from exploratory interviews with three farmer-collaborators, which illustrate how tools like ours can help farmers in myriad ways: setting benchmarks to measure on-farm improvement over time, legitimizing their work through scientific grounding, communicating environmental impacts to public audiences, increasing sales to fund sustainability efforts, gaining competitive edge and others.

More broadly, the article exemplifies how marketplaces can strengthen symbiotic linkages between individuals, community allies and social goals through data measurement and communication, and reflects on how planners and policymakers might support these connections to advance public purposes.

This research responds uniquely to a critical need identified by practitioners and academics to expand understanding and awareness of the ecosystem services farms provide.