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Considerable attention has been given to the vulnerability of young people leaving care in the UK in their transition to adulthood. To date, however, there has been limited focus on the perceptions of care leavers about what factors enable and inhibit effective practice. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This systematic literature review sought to elicit the views of UK care leavers in identifying barriers and facilitators to the process of transition to adulthood. Qualitative studies in the care-leaving field were identified, of which seven met inclusion criteria and were included in the final synthesis.

The findings yielded a range of facilitators, including authentic and consistent relationships with those acting in the role of corporate parent; and flexible systems, which accommodated personal readiness for leaving care. Barriers included insufficient recognition of, and a lack of support for, the psychological dimensions of transition, exacerbated by insufficient support networks.

This literature search yielded seven qualitative papers, some with small sample sizes, meaning that the findings may not be representative of a wider population or directly relevant to international contexts.

Suggestions for enhancing the transition process are posited. In particular, the potential usefulness of an “interdependence” transition approach for UK care leavers is proposed.

This study analyses qualitative data, thus constituting a response to policy calls for care leaver views to be central to transition processes.

AS J. L. Hobbs shows so clearly in his recent book, the interest in local history is growing enormously at present. The universities, training colleges and schools, as well as the institutions of further education, are all making more use of local studies—geographical, economic, social and historical—in their regular courses, in their advanced work, and in their publications.

THIS number will appear at the beginning of the Leeds Conference. Although there is no evidence that the attendance will surpass the record attendance registered at the Birmingham Conference, there is every reason to believe that the attendance at Leeds will be very large. The year is one of importance in the history of the city, for it has marked the 300th anniversary of its charter. We hope that some of the festival spirit will survive into the week of the Conference. As a contributor has suggested on another page, we hope that all librarians who attend will do so with the determination to make the Conference one of the friendliest possible character. It has occasionally been pointed out that as the Association grows older it is liable to become more stilted and formal; that institutions and people become standardized and less dynamic. This, if it were true, would be a great pity.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/14664100010332748. When citing the article, please cite: P. Stutchfield, S. Nicklin, P. Minchom, T. Powell, A. Kelly, V. Klimach, R. Davies, S. Horrocks, (2000), “Assessment of health status at two years of very low birthweight infants – clinical governance”, British Journal of Clinical Governance, Vol. 5 Iss 1 pp. 14 - 21.

All seventeen had graciously agreed to my proposal to gather for a small conference to seek consensus. A generous grant from the Pierian Press Foundation would cover all of our expenses for a long weekend at a resort hotel; the only condition of the grant was that we offer our results to Reference Services Review for first publication. Over the past five years each of the seventeen had in turn accepted my challenge to answer the following question:

Waiting times for secondary care orthopaedic appointments have been problematic for many years and led to the development of services outside traditional secondary care settings. The purpose of this paper is to question the sustainability of a primary care musculoskeletal interface service in the face of continuing policy change and future upheavals in the NHS design.

This paper considers the political, organisational, and governance issues faced by the NHS Bath and North East Somerset Orthopaedic Interface Service (OIS). It discusses critical factors that test its viability.

The OIS retain 50 per cent of orthopaedic patients referred via the Choose and Book system. Of those, 21 per cent of patients seen were referred onto secondary care, the rest are managed in primary care. Patient feedback on their experience within the OIS service is overwhelmingly positive.

The experiences described could be of value to new services, or for future benchmarking.

Increasingly services will be provided outside traditional secondary care settings. There needs to be an increasing emphasis on self‐management as resources become increasingly under pressure.

The paper will be of interest to clinicians, commissioners, providers and possibly the general public. There was a flurry of literature when these services were first established but there has been less published of late, and this paper provides a contemporary perspective.

THE PUBLIC LIBRARIES CONFERENCE in Blackpool will be opened on 7 September by the President of the Library Association Dr George Chandler, who will also award three honorary fellowships. The recipients are to be Miss Eileen Colwell, doyenne of British children's libraries and formerly a lecturer at Loughborough library school, W. S. Haugh, librarian of Bristol, and S H Horrocks, formerly librarian of Reading.

The project on which I have been sent to Nigeria is a joint library project between the Government of the Eastern Region and Unesco. The intention is that a pilot public library shall be established in Enugu, the capital city, which shall give a service to the people of the town, form the headquarters of the regional service and act as a model library for other towns in the Region and elsewhere in Africa. Similar pilot libraries have been successfully established in Delhi and in Medellin.

A SPLENDID conference, I thought. True, there were those who complained, those who thought some of the papers were elementary and those who thought that we had come a long way to learn very little. I don't agree at all. Some of the papers did, I admit, deal with basic considerations but it does nothing but good to re‐examine the framework of our services from time to time. In any case other papers were erudite, and for the first time I have seen an audience of librarians and authority members stunned, almost, into silence.

An inquiry into the constitution of the experience of patienthood. It understands “becoming a patient” as a production of a subjectivity, in other words as a process of individuation and milieu that occurs through an ontology of production. This ontology of production can, of course, also be understood as a political ontology. Therefore, this is, first of all, an inquiry into a mode of production, and, secondly, an inquiry into its relation to the issue of social justice – because of effects of digital divisions. In these terms, it also reflects on how expert discourses, such as in medical sociology and science studies (STS), can (and do) articulate their problems.

An integrative mode of discourse analysis, strongly related to discursive institutionalism, called semantic agency theory: it considers those arrangements (institutions, informal organizations, networks, collectivities, etc.) and assemblages (intellectual equipment, vernacular epistemologies, etc.) that are constitutive of how the issue of “patient experience” can be articulated form its position within an ontology of production.

The aim not being the production of a finite result, what is needed is a shift in how “the construction of patient experience” is produced by expert discourses. While the inquiry is not primarily an empirical study and is also limited to “Western societies,” it emphasizes that there is a relation between political ontologies (including the issues of social justice) and the subjectivities that shape the experiences of people in contemporary health care systems, and, finally, that this relation is troubled by the effects of the digital divide(s).

A proposal “to interrogate and trouble” some innovative extensions and revisions – even though it will not be able to speculate about matters of degree – to contemporary theories of biomedicalization, patienthood, and managed care.