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Investigates 1999/2000 health promotion activities in prisons in England and Wales and documents the range and quality of health promotion occurring in prisons, against which future activity might be measured. Finds that health promotion is under‐resourced and the concept and practice poorly understood. Health needs assessment tended to be analysis of and for health‐care services and, except in a minority of cases, did not include consultation with staff, prisoners or their families. Where responsibility was shared and the work based on multi‐disciplinary approaches, it seems more likely to have been reported accurately as health promotion activity. The official policy of a healthy settings/whole prison approach was not understood by many and its application was limited. The findings have informed the development of a new health promotion strategy for the prison service in England and Wales.

Traces the origins of the fashion for quality assurance and discusses the requisites of a quality assurance strategy. On the basis of a Department of Health funded study in England and Wales in 1989, draws attention to the wide range of activities which have been swept into the Quality Assurance net, the striking differences between the factors cited as constraining or facilitating the development of quality assurance, and the abysmal lack of data on cost of resources or to any systematic monitoring and evaluation. Suggests that the purchaser‐provider split may have worsened the situation.

This paper aims to measure access to food in an inner London borough.

There were six phases, which included designing food baskets, consultation with local residents and a shop survey. Recognising the cultural make‐up of the borough food baskets and menus were developed for four key communities, namely: White British, Black Caribbean, Turkish, and Black African. Three areas were identified for the study and shopping hubs identified with a 500‐metre radius from a central parade of shops.

The findings paint an intricate web of interactions ranging from availability in shops to accessibility and affordability being key issues for some groups. It was found that in the areas studied there was availability of some key healthy items, namely fresh fruit and vegetables, but other items such as: fresh meat and poultry, fish, lower fat dairy foods, high fibre pasta and brown rice were not available. Access was found to be defined, by local people, as more extensive than just physical distance to/from shops – for many shopping was made more difficult by having to use taxis and inconvenient buses. Small shops were important in delivering healthy food options to communities in areas of deprivation and were judged to offer a better range and more appropriate food than the branches of the major supermarket chains.

The importance of monitoring the impact of shops and shop closures on healthy food availability is emphased. From a policy perspective the findings suggest that approaches based on individual agency need to be balanced with upstream public health nutrition approaches in order to influence the options available.

The paper is arguably the first to examine and dissect the issue of food availability and accessibility in the inner London borough in question, especially in the light of its proposed redevelopment for the London Olympics in 2012.

This article uses data from the 1993 Health and Lifestyles Survey of England to present findings on how, why and when people use cooking skills; where and from whom people learn these skills. The implications for policy are explored. The survey data suggests that socio‐economic status and education are associated with the sources of people’s knowledge about cooking. The first or prime source of learning about cooking skills was reported to be mothers; cooking classes in school were cited as the next most important by the majority of correspondents, with some class and educational variations. The importance of mothers as sources of information on cooking skills is observed in all social classes. What emerges is a population unsure of specific cooking techniques and lacking in confidence to apply techniques and cook certain foods. Women still bear the burden of cooking for the household, with four out of every five women respondents cooking on most or every day, compared with one in five men. This may be related to the large number of men who claim to have no cooking skills (one in five).

An approach based on a training and development package for the implementation of a quality assurance programme is described. The problems of implementation are analysed and conclusions drawn.

SOCIAL scientists have not yet been able to formulate any general laws about behaviour in industry that are capable of broad application. In recent years, however, they have made many useful case studies of which the one just published by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research is typical. It is an approach to the problem which can do much to increase the understanding of the way in which people react to common industrial situations.

WHEN delivering his Elbourne lecture Sir Geoffrey Vickers related the following incident. ‘As a very inexperienced subaltern in the old war, my company commander once said to me: “Vickers, the company will bathe this afternoon. Arrange.” In the Flemish hamlet where we were billeted the only bath of any kind was in the local nunnery. The nuns were charity itself but I couldn't ask them to bathe a hundred men. I reviewed other fluid‐containing objects which might be potential baths—cattle drinking troughs, empty beer barrels—and found practical or ethical objections to them all. At that point I had the misfortune to meet my company commander again and was forced to confess that I had not yet solved my problem. He was annoyed. “Whatever have you been doing all this time?” he said. Then, turning his own mind to the problem, apparently for the first time, he added: “Take the company limbers off their wheels, put the tilts inside and the cookers beside them for the hot water; four baths each four feet square, four men to a bath, do the whole job in an hour. Why don't you use your brains?”’

WHY is it, may we enquire, that so few work study technicians write about work study?

.Counter Competition. SUPERMARKETS and private shopkeepers battle for business in every High Street. In all shopping centres the private trader competes for the customer's cash with chain and departmental stores. He finds life increasingly difficult in face of rising overheads and shrinking profit margins.