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Mental health service improvement initiatives often involve the setting of targets and monitoring of performance. The purpose of this paper is to describe the application of appreciative enquiry (AE), a radically different but complementary approach to quality assurance and improvement, to specialist mental health services across a health region.

This case study describes a regional quality improvement (QI) project involving 12 early intervention in psychosis (EIP) services in South West England. In total, 40 people were trained in AE interviewing skills and in non-reciprocal peer review visits 59 interviews were conducted involving 103 interviewees including service users, carers, clinicians, managers and commissioners. Immediate verbal feedback was provided and main themes summarised in individual reports to host teams using the following headings: team values, strengths, dreams and development plans. A thematic analysis was conducted on team reports and a project report produced which summarised the stages and results of this regional initiative.

All participants rated the experience as positive; it enhanced staff motivation and led to service development and improvement.

The experiences of these 12 EIP teams may not necessarily be generalisable to other services/regions but this positive approach to service improvement could be widely applied.

AE is applicable in large-scale QI initiatives.

To the authors knowledge this is the first time that AE has been applied to large-scale mental health service improvement and innovation.

Prior research has highlighted gender differences in academic motivational attributes, and how these predict academic achievement for each gender; however, a vast amount of inconsistency exists amongst such literature. The purpose of this paper is to examine the predictive value of academic motivation (achievement goal, leaning goal, performance goal (PG), self-efficacy (SE), and active learning strategies (ALS)) and study time in explaining academic achievement amongst male and female students.

Cross-sectional survey design was applied. Participants were sampled opportunistically, and consisted of final year undergraduate students, including both males (n=126) and females (n=189) attending various courses at a UK university.

A multiple regression analysis carried out for each gender revealed that study time, ALS, PG, and SE were significant predictors of achievement for males, whereas SE was the only significant predictor of achievement for females.

These findings offer practical implications in terms of methods employed by educators to enhance academic achievement. Such implications highlight the importance of the development of SE in both genders and propose methods in which universities can enhance motivation in male and female students. Recommendations for future research are also made.

This article explodes traditional notions of ethnographic documentary, and instead positions the emerging practice of ethnocinema as a 21st century modality that falls within the paradigm of what Denzin calls the ‘eighth moment scholarship’ in this ‘fractured future’. Drawing on the monological, dialogic and imagistic ‘data’ from the ethnocinematic research project Cross‐Marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education, the article uses ethnographic documentary film theory (including Minh‐ha, Rouch, and Aufderheide) and the critical pedagogical scholarship of McLaren to examine notions of performative identity construction and the possibility of intercultural identities and collaborations. Utilising the central metaphor of Minh‐ha’s ethnographic and filmic ‘zoo’, which cages those who are Othered by race, class, gender, sexuality and a myriad of differences, this article and ethnocinema overall seek to overthrow notions of difference, culture and community while recognising the increasingly prescient power of McLuhan’s dictum that the ‘medium is the message’ in this rhizomatic age.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the University of Exeter Family Interventions (FIs) training programme for the South West region which was commissioned as part of the NHS England Access and Waiting Times standards (A&WTS) initiative for early psychosis. This programme (10 taught days and 6 months of supervised practice) is designed to maximise implementation in practice.

The programme introduces students to a flexible, widely applicable FI approach which integrates cognitive behavioural/psycho-educational and systemic approaches. It refreshes and develops CBT-based psycho-social intervention skills, so that clinicians feel confident to use them in family sessions and integrate these with foundation level family therapy skills. The approach facilitates engagement, and it is designed so that every session is a “mini intervention”. This enables clinicians to offer standard NICE-concordant FI or a briefer intervention if this is sufficient to meet the particular needs of a family.

This paper provides details of the regional training programme and evaluates the first four training courses delivered to nine early intervention in psychosis teams. It considers how a combination of training a critical mass of staff in each service, ongoing supervision, regional events to maintain skills and motivation to deliver FI, and the national and regional auditing of FI as part of the A&WTS all contribute to clinical implementation.

The unique design of this programme maximises implementation in practice by virtue of its widely applicable integrated FI approach, the focus on ongoing skills development and by embedding it within regional and local service support structures.