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This study investigates the role of leadership and cultural transformation in facilitating Lean Six Sigma (LSS) practices in clinical pharmacy settings to reduce medicine waste within the UK National Health Services (NHS).

A systematic literature review on Lean Six Sigma in health care was conducted to develop an analytical framework. This was followed by a qualitative case study of an English NHS trust to test the framework, exploring pharmacists' adoption of LSS practices and their impact on staff behaviour, focussing on leadership decisions and organisational culture.

The research highlights the significance of leadership’s prioritisation in waste reduction efforts and its influence on staff engagement. It also examines the intricate relationship between leadership decisions, education and training, resource allocation, and the prevailing clinical culture, which shapes pharmacists' behaviours and attitudes towards LSS practices and waste reduction.

The study’s focus on a single NHS trust limits the generalisability of the findings, suggesting the need for further research across different healthcare settings.

The study recommends a cultural transformation, earlier training, and reformation in service strategy to enhance the adoption of LSS practices and contribute to a more sustainable future for the wider health services.

Effective medicine waste management prevents harm and helps address the current NHS medicine shortage. The NHS can allocate resources efficiently, ensure timely treatment, and prepare for future disruptions by implementing the proposed framework.

We developed a leadership model for the NHS to reduce medicine waste, offering a novel approach to addressing the challenge of medicine waste through leadership and cultural transformation.

This analysis of chat reference transcripts assesses differences in how librarians and graduate assistants (GAs) incorporate teaching strategies in responding to chat reference inquiries in social sciences, health sciences, humanities, STEM and business/economics at a large, public R1 university in the United States.

Researchers with disciplinary assignments in five different subject domains conducted qualitative analysis of a purposive sample of 982 transcripts of chat interactions during four semesters in 2021 and 2022.

Some form of information literacy instruction (ILI) occurred in 58% of the transcripts, with slightly less teaching occurring in social sciences inquiries than in other subject areas. Of transcripts that included teaching strategies, search procedures predominated, followed by a mix of concepts and procedures, and the least with concepts only. Chat providers taught concepts specific to social sciences, health sciences and humanities, but not to STEM or business.

The study compares transcripts at one institution; findings may be most applicable to large, research institutions that seek to incorporate ILI in online reference services.

Chat reference training should include best practices for ILI relevant to specific subject domains for providers without background in those disciplines and recommendations for referrals to subject specialists.

Existing ILI literature does not address the question of how chat providers teach concepts rooted in a specific subject domain or offer a comparison of teaching strategies employed in different disciplines, by librarians versus GAs or staff.

Research shows data-informed leadership matters for school improvement and student achievement, but less is known about what motivates leaders’ data use toward such outcomes, particularly in the Catholic school context.

This qualitative interview study uses interview (n = 23) data from a sample of Catholic school leaders to unpack how they conceptualize data, the motivations encouraging their data use and the challenges inhibiting data routines.

Catholic school leaders largely shared a narrow definition of data as quantitative, standardized achievement data, were motivated by a moral imperative to meet students’ needs and faced several common challenges, including time constraints, uncertainty in measurement, limited capacity and resources and issues of turnover at the classroom and school levels.

School leaders can assuage tension around data by broadening the scope of measures and appealing to teachers’ sense of personal responsibility and commitment to students.

These findings extend the research in three ways. They bring to light an important tension between data-informed practice and a whole child approach to education, highlight the possibility of motivating data use through conscience rather than compliance and provide insight into data perceptions in private schools, an understudied context in the literature.

This paper aims to describe the academic community’s perspectives about climate change learning and engagement opportunities by means of a case study at the University of Passo Fundo, Brazil.

A set of interviews and focus groups were conducted, and data collection focused on three main groups, namely, university students, professors and managers. The analysis was developed through content analysis of the individual interviews and focus groups.

The results showed that the academic community is trying to change their attitudes and behaviours, and students would like to learn more about climate change.

This investigation combines the views of different academic groups and indicates initiatives that could boost the university initiatives towards climate action and learning.

This study aims to analyse the motivations and underlying assumptions of decision makers driving the adoption of sustainability-oriented targets in executive compensation (SCTs) to better understand SCTs’ impact on sustainability performance.

Through a qualitative approach, 15 in-depth interviews are conducted in a two-tier governance setting. Participants include management and supervisory board members, compensation consultants and other stakeholders involved in proxy voting.

SCT implementation is primarily determined by meeting shareholders’ expectations rather than those of other stakeholders. Decision makers react in a differentiated way to increased expectations by implementing either primarily symbolic or substantive measures and encounter different implementation challenges like insufficient data quality and a lack of experience within supervisory boards, both of which potentially contribute to decoupling.

The study offers valuable insights for companies in designing SCTs and emphasises the significance of addressing decoupling to effectively enhance sustainability performance through SCTs and provides a foundation for future studies aimed at analysing this phenomenon.

Using a neo-institutional theory lens, this study marks one of the first interview-based investigations to distinguish between symbolic and substantial SCTs. It delves deeply into the role of decoupling and the associated challenges, offering fresh perspectives within the under-researched framework of a two-tier corporate governance structure. Moreover, this study aims to meticulously capture the real-world design practices and implementation processes of SCTs through experts, an aspect that was emphasised as a limitation in previous studies.

This paper aims to explore the accelerations and constraints libraries, archives, museums and heritage organisations (“collections-holding organisations”) face in their role as collection data providers for digital infrastructures. To date, digital infrastructures operate within the cultural heritage domain typically as data aggregation platforms, such as Europeana or Art UK.

Semi-structured interviews with 18 individuals in 8 UK collections-holding organisations and 2 international aggregators.

Discussions about digital infrastructure development often lay great emphasis on questions and problems that are technical and legal in nature. As important as technical and legal matters are, more latent, yet potent challenges exist too. Though less discussed in the literature, collections-holding organisations' capacity to participate in digital infrastructures is dependent on a complex interplay of funding allocation across the sector, divergent traditions of collection description and disciplinaries’ idiosyncrasies. Accordingly, we call for better social-cultural and trans-sectoral (collections-holding organisations, universities and technological providers) understandings of collection data infrastructure development.

The authors recommend developing more understanding of the social-cultural aspects (e.g. disciplinary conventions) and their impact on collection data dissemination. More studies on the impact and opportunities of unified collections for different audiences and collections-holding organisations themselves are required too.

Sustainable financial investment across the heritage sector is required to address the discrepancies between different organisation types in their capacity to deliver collection data. Smaller organisations play a vital role in diversifying the (digital) historical canon, but they often struggle to digitise collections and bring catalogues online in the first place. In addition, investment in existing infrastructures for collection data dissemination and unification is necessary, instead of creating new platforms, with various levels of uptake and longevity. Ongoing investments in collections curation and high-quality cataloguing are prerequisites for a sustainable heritage sector and collection data infrastructures. Investments in the sustainability of infrastructures are not a replacement for research and vice versa.

The authors recommend establishing networks where collections-holding organisations, technology providers and users can communicate their experiences and needs in an ongoing way and influence policy.

To date, the research focus on developing collection data infrastructures has tended to be on the drive to adopt specific technological solutions and copyright licensing practices. This paper offers a critical and holistic analysis of the dispersed experience of collections-holding organisations in their role as data providers for digital infrastructures. The paper contributes to the emerging understanding of the latent factors that make infrastructural endeavours in the heritage sector complex undertakings.

The purpose of this paper is to determine how we ought to distinguish between reference and readers' advisory (RA) service, given the latter’s turn toward a whole collection approach. In other words, the paper answers this question: If both reference and RA librarians aim to meet patrons’ information needs and may theoretically do so using the same materials, then how are we to differentiate the two services conceptually?

In this conceptual paper, we posit that we can distinguish between RA and reference using Louise Rosenblatt’s theory of the aesthetic transaction. With this theory in hand, we can redefine the service distinction in terms of the stance – aesthetic or efferent – that the patron expects to take toward the material they seek.

On our account, the reader’s desired stance becomes a kind of hermeneutical lens through which a library worker may productively evaluate plausible pathways and materials. An aesthetic lens is characteristic of RA; it makes features of potential aesthetic transactions between a particular reader and a particular text (or genre or author’s oeuvre) salient.

The proposed account constitutes a novel application of Rosenblattian response theory, one that grounds and refines the going view that RA’s proper focus is on supporting a particular sort of experience rather than providing particular sorts of texts. This theoretical emendation also better aligns the service distinction with contemporary conceptualizations of RA as a “whole collection” service. Important practical and philosophical implications follow from the new account.

Strengths-based professional development has been associated with positive outcomes in academia and in the organizational workplace. Students pursuing their doctoral degrees in the biomedical sciences in the US are often on graduate assistantships, where they experience an academic component to their training integrated with an employee-like existence. The individual who serves as their academic and research advisor is often their supervisor, who pays their stipend. The traditional training structure poses unique challenges and may be accompanied by stress, burnout and imposter phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to utilize a strengths-based approach to equip students with essential personal and professional skills that build self-awareness and self-confidence further preparing them for their future in the scientific workforce.

The authors developed and implemented a novel strengths-based professional development cohort program for doctoral students in the biomedical sciences at a research-intensive (R1) institution. The program was designed to create a supportive and inclusive space for participants (n = 18) to explore their identity as a student and scientists and to develop and leverage their talents for more effective and strategic use. Program outcomes were evaluated through a mixed methods case study design using a post-program Likert-based survey (n = 10 participants) and participant interviews (n = 13). Explanatory sequential design was used in the interpretation of the findings.

The results show that the program had a positive impact on students’ perceptions of themselves as scientists, as well as on their self-efficacy, self-confidence and interpersonal interactions in the research setting.

This strengths-based professional development program demonstrates immense potential as a model to equip students with self-awareness and a new foundation of essential skills needed to supplement their technical and scientific training for their future careers in the team-based workplace.

This study demonstrates how professional development programming can complement scientific training by equipping students with self-awareness and other lifelong skills to navigate feelings of imposter phenomenon and interpersonal relationships in the team-based workplace.

Facility management (FM) in healthcare is an organisational function that provides non-medical activities, ensuring operational functionality of critical health infrastructure. FM leaders are under pressure to implement the digital transformation, confronted with a highly complex and challenging operational environment. However, the current scope and understanding of the digital transformation in FM is rather limited, with a strong focus on technology. This perspective is inadequate to realise a digital transformation in healthcare organisations and requires a new framework. To ensure the practical applicability, a clearer depiction on how FM practitioners in the field, currently understand the digital transformation, is necessary.

A sequential exploratory mixed-methods design was chosen with a qualitative data collection and quantitative data analysis phase. A total of 23 semi-structured research interviews with professionals from FM in healthcare in Switzerland were carried out. Topic modeling was used to analyse, identify and cluster topics.

In total, nine distinct digital transformation topics were generated: ‘addressing future organisational and people needs’, ‘end-user-oriented processes’, ‘digitalisation management vs. digital tools’, ‘major organisational change’, ‘information exchange and work culture’, ‘digital systems’, ‘pressure’, ‘company-wide strategy’ and ‘management support and communication involving non-medical support services’. The findings indicate that FM practitioners perceive the digital transformation beyond the purely technological viewpoint, although they lack the know-how and instruments necessary to implement the digital transformation.

This study employs an innovative research design, resulting in foundational insights on how FM in healthcare perceives the digital transformation. As such, the study expands the notion on what the digital transformation means for the FM field.

This study aims to examine the factors of implementing istibdal waqf and generating cash waqf funds through istibdal in Penang. This study was based on the previous problem statements, stating that waqf property could not be developed due to lack of cash funds. This has allowed the study to explore the factors for implementing istibdal waqf property and the extent to which the istibdal method can generate cash waqf funds in Penang.

This study adopted a qualitative method by conducting semi-structured interviews to achieve its research goals. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to comprehensively understand the current practice on istibdal cases in Penang State Islamic Religious Council (MAINPP) through official institutions concerned with waqf management practices in Penang. This research relied on purposive sampling to select the informants. It is a sampling strategy to select the informants in advance based on the research question. To achieve the purpose of this study, two officers from MAINPP were selected based on their working experience and specialisation criteria. As a result, several themes were successfully defined from the interview data before being analysed based on the content analysis method.

The results present three istibdal implementation processes outlined by MAINPP, namely, the istibdal implementation process for waqf land involved in the acquisition by state authorities (PBN), non-productive waqf land and istibdal applications from certain parties. The results also reveal two factors in implementing istibdal in Penang: the acquisition of waqf land by PBN and the application of istibdal for cemeteries by the Islamic Centre of Universiti Sains Malaysia. From the point of cash fund generation, no case of istibdal implementation records the generation of cash funds to MAINPP. Thus, this study ends with proposals for improving the process and implementing istibdal in Penang to generate cash funds to help MAINPP manage waqf properties.

The study only focused on implementing factors and generating cash waqf funds through istibdal in Penang. At the same time, it can be expanded to other states like Terengganu, Johor and Kelantan. This study only interviewed officers who manage matters related to the affairs of waqf properties. Therefore, it is believed that the study can be extended to other respondents, such as experts in cash fund generation investments and others.

This study proposed improvements to the policy and practice of istibdal waqf property to MAINPP after the shortcomings were identified throughout this study. If improved, these proposals will significantly impact the waqf properties involved in implementing istibdal, where it can generate cash and ensure the constant economic value of waqf properties.

This study has great implications for society through the development of a cash waqf fund that can provide great benefits to the needy, in addition to increasing funds for the welfare expenditure of Muslims through rental income, investment and development. Progress and significant impact on waqf property can provide a high indicator of the efficiency of an organisation in managing waqf property. This can attract the interest of the public, especially the wealthy, to always fulfil welfare through the waqf mechanism and share the wealth with the needy.

This study contributes to comprehensive field data on the implementation of istibdal in Penang. The data analysis results are significant to be used by the waqf property management.