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Persistent and particular health and social care challenges face socially excluded groups and communities in the more deprived areas of the country. Involvement of communities in design and delivery of services, including those whose voices have traditionally not been heard, will help to shape services to meet better their health and well‐being needs. Effective community‐led commissioning can empower individuals and communities by giving them the chance to voice their needs, while local ownership of the process will increase the relevance of services, and improve their uptake and sustainability. For commissioners, the ‘World Class’ commissioning agenda is about connecting development of services with the real requirements of communities, and increasing engagement and satisfaction with services.

Connected Care, Turning Point's model for involving the community in the design and delivery of integrated health and well‐being services, aims to involve the community in the commissioning process in a way which fundamentally shifts the balance of power in favour of local people. The model has been tested in a number of areas across the country, and previous articles in the Journal of Integrated Care have charted the progress of the original pilot in Hartlepool. Cost‐benefits of the approach are now becoming clearer. Implementation of a new community‐led social enterprise in Hartlepool began in 2007, and today its Connected Care service provides community outreach, information, access to a range of health and social care services, advocacy, co‐ordination and low‐level support to the people of Owton. Key lessons, from Hartlepool and elsewhere, have centred on the value of making the case for service redesign from the ‘bottom up’ and building the capacity of the community to play a role in service delivery, while also promoting strong leadership within commissioning organisations to build ‘top‐down’ support for the implementation of outcomes defined through intensive community engagement. The new Government's ‘localism’ agenda creates new opportunities for community‐led integration, and the Connected Care pilots provide a number of learning points about how this agenda might be successfully progressed.

Denied by practitioners and erased from all official documents, the requirement that ex‐users be clean for two years before being employed is supposedly no longer with us. But, as Andrew Gordon reveals, despite the denials, the two‐year rule is alive and kicking and doing its best to keep ex‐users out of work.

What is it about academia anyway? We profess to hate it, spend endless amounts of time complaining about it, and yet we in academia will do practically anything to stay. The pay may be low, job security elusive, and in the end, it's not the glamorous work we envisioned it would be. Yet, it still holds fascination and interest for us. This is an article about American academic fiction. By academic fiction, I mean novels whosemain characters are professors, college students, and those individuals associated with academia. These works reveal many truths about the higher education experience not readily available elsewhere. We learn about ourselves and the university community in which we work.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

The purpose of this paper was to show that the generalised viscosity model can correctly characterise suspension data over both a wide range of concentration as well as a wide range of temperature. A second objective of this study was to show theoretically and experimentally how the interaction coefficient from the generalised viscosity model also appears to have some thermodynamic properties.

In this study, many well‐known suspension equations were shown mathematically to be subsets of the generalised viscosity equation. The generalised viscosity equation was also found to be able to be reduced mathematically to two well‐known dilute solution equations (Huggins and Kramer's equations) as well. The relationship between Huggins and Kramer's constants and the interaction coefficient from the generalised viscosity equation yielded the potential to evaluate the solubility characteristics of the interaction coefficient. The value of the interaction coefficient was then found to be able to be evaluated as a function of temperature to enhance an understanding of the thermodynamic characteristics of the interaction coefficient using the data of Bueche.

In this study, a polymer plasticiser system involving polymethyl methacrylate in the plasticiser diethyl phthalate yielded an interaction coefficient, σ, primarily in the expected plasticiser range from 0< σ<1. It was also found that the generalised viscosity equation fit Bueche's polymer plasticiser data remarkably well over the whole concentration range for temperatures ranging from 30°C to 140°C. This study also appeared to show that the interaction coefficient from the generalised viscosity model can apparently characterise thermal transitions as well as thermodynamic solubility for a polymer solute (i.e. polymethyl methacrylate) when viscosity is evaluated over a wide temperature range. This result was particularly significant since Bueche's data covered 25 decades of viscosity on a log scale.

This is the first paper to successfully explore the thermodynamic characteristics of the interaction coefficient of the generalised viscosity equation. This opens up new avenues for evaluating the solubility and thermodynamic characteristics of various additives in solutions and polymeric formulations.