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This article considers the potential for single assessment to overcome longstanding difficulties with care management, looks at initial progress in one SHA area and identifies some key priorities for the next stages of local implementation. We conclude that, not only is much more work required in localities, but additional national guidance and resources may also be required.

In this paper, we draw on ethnographic research which tracked older people's journeys through the health and social care system, highlighting some of the key issues which will need to be addressed if the new single assessment process is to become user‐ and carer‐friendly. We argue that the concept of the ‘whole system’ is a misnomer, and a more accurate picture is that of a world at war, with territorial disputes rife and border controls tighter than ever. We suggest that too much emphasis has been placed on IT systems and paperwork and that the real challenge is to cut through the jargon of modernisation and to see things from a wholly different perspective.

This paper describes how Hertfordshire met the challenge of providing a training programme to improve services for older people, with the introduction of single assessment, in the complex setting of a shire county with a number of PCTs, acute trusts, a county partnership trust and a county council social care service.Having set the context for single assessment, it describes the Hertfordshire approach. It focuses on some of the key drivers for successful implementation of such a radical programme of change: the siting of sessions by geographical location, the crucial role of managers and team leaders, setting the context of the sessions in the reality of staff experience, the importance of a shared language, common paperwork and clear protocols, and the role of the local implementation teams in supporting the process both through its implementation phase and into the future.Finally, it recognises that this training programme was only one aspect of equipping staff to be confident and competent in their assessments of older people, and that service improvements will be achieved gradually, requiring commitment from managers and support from the local implementation teams.

Joint working between health and social services has been a key focus of policy in recent years, albeit ‐ underneath the protocols and partnership agreements ‐ integrated processes have developed unevenly. A single shared assessment tool has been one of the concrete expressions of policy on the ground. This paper explores the implementation of the shared assessment process in Scotland. It discusses the broader policy agenda, before exploring the introduction of the shared assessment tool in a large urban authority. Based primarily on interviews with front‐line staff in health and social work and managers charged with delivering shared assessment, the paper suggests a lack of engagement on issues such as working cultures and equity of workloads, while some of the main reasons behind the implementation of shared assessment, such as overcoming duplication, have not generally materialised for staff. Overall, single shared assessment has been driven by process rather than by engagement with wider ideas about joint working, which has led to uneven and at times unwilling implementation.

This paper demonstrates how a single assessment tool can be linked to intermediate care services eligibility criteria to examine referrals and admissions to these services, by reporting on a project in a locality in East Kent. The project involved implementing a standardised patient assessment tool for three months in all intermediate care services, to examine the suitability of patients entering each of these intermediate care services. This paper focuses on the results of the community assessment rehabilitation team (CART), a recuperative care centre and the day hospital. After analysing patient assessments, we found that some patients in all intermediate care services were placed there inappropriately, and this was most evident in the day hospital. The paper concludes with considerations and suggestions for improving the effectiveness of assessment tools in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that common method variance, specifically single-source bias, threatens the validity of a university-created student assessment of instructor instrument, suggesting that decisions made from these assessments are inherently flawed or skewed. Single-source bias leads to generalizations about assessments that might influence the ability of raters to separate multiple behaviors of an instructor.

Exploratory factor analysis, nested confirmatory factor analysis and within-and-between analysis are used to assess a university-developed, proprietary student assessment of instructor instrument to determine whether a hypothesized factor structure is identifiable. The instrument was developed over a three-year period by a university-mandated committee.

Findings suggest that common method variance, specifically single-source bias, resulted in the inability to identify hypothesized constructs statistically. Additional information is needed to identify valid instruments and an effective collection method for assessment.

Institutions are not guaranteed valid or useful instruments even if they invest significant time and resources to produce one. Without accurate instrumentation, there is insufficient information to assess constructs for teaching excellence. More valid measurement criteria can result from using multiple methods, altering collection times and educating students to distinguish multiple traits and behaviors of individual instructors more accurately.

This paper documents the three-year development of a university-wide student assessment of instructor instrument and carries development through to examining the psychometric properties and appropriateness of using this instrument to evaluate instructors.

This article aims to assist people responsible for revising local approaches to community care assessment in line with government requirements as detailed in the NSF for Older People. It analyses key elements and suggests approaches to be adopted, some of which are based on workshops with local stakeholders from a number of authorities.

Assessing the outcome of lean transformation journey has been of interest to both researchers and practitioners. Various qualitative and quantitative assessment methodologies have been proposed in literature to track and measure the degree of leanness attained. The purpose of this paper is to understand the evolution of this leanness assessment literature over different attributes and identify gaps for future research.

A detailed literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers addressing leanness assessment was performed. Content analysis methodology involving a four-step process suggested by Mayring (2004) was adopted for this study.

The number of studies in literature on leanness assessment is low when compared to that in the area of lean implementation. Assessment methodologies developed are of wide range, varying from simple qualitative checklist to complex quantitative mathematical models. Following the trend of lean implementation literature, lean thinking assessment literature is also getting transformed from process-level monitoring to enterprise-level monitoring. Finally, based on this review, a simplified leanness assessment framework is proposed for future validation.

Only peer-reviewed journals and conference papers were analyzed, while excluding the manuals, reports, and white papers from practice. Clustering of leanness assessment literature revealed that future studies in this domain would fall into two major categories, namely manufacturing leanness assessment and service leanness assessment.

Practitioners can use this review study to choose a suitable methodology for assessing the leanness attained in their organization by controlling for the structural attributes identified.

This is the first paper to review the topic “leanness assessment.” The review analyzes the entire literature available on leanness assessment to summarize its current status and identify potential future directions.

The purpose of this paper is to raise issues around the involvement of clinicians relevant to current policies for integrated care by reviewing a previous policy to integrate assessments.

This paper is a review of data from a survey of specialist clinicians' involvement in the single assessment process for older people.

The paper finds that clinician involvement was limited, with assessments not changing to a discernable degree and little involvement of older people. Changes to assessment were predominantly related to paperwork. However, the use of standardised tools by clinicians did increase. The use of shared record systems with social services was significantly associated with involvement.

Clinicians have previously not been engaged in policies around integrated assessments. Factors that can help engagement include development of a shared vision, drawing on the traditions of particular groups of clinicians in informing integrated assessment policies, and appropriate IT systems to promote information sharing. Factors hindering engagement include national policy implementation, viewed as inimical to clinical practice and low involvement by service users/patients.

Reviewing such previously implemented polices around integration, particularly at the assessment stage, offers lessons to learn in terms of the factors that may help or hinder the achievement of integrated practice, particularly regarding current policies around clinical leadership.

Urban resilience is becoming increasingly important due to increasing degree of urbanization and a combination of several factors affecting urban vulnerability. Urban resilience is also understood as a capacity of a system to prepare, respond and recover from multi-hazard threats. The purpose of multi-risk approach (MRA) is to take into consideration interdependencies between multiple risks, which can trigger a chain of natural and manmade events with different spatial and temporal scales. The purpose of this study is to understand correlation between multi-risk approach and urban resilience.

To increase urban resilience, MRA should also include multi-risk governance, which is based on understanding how existing institutional and governance structures, individual judgments and communication of risk assessment results shape decision-making processes.

This paper is based on extensive fieldwork in the test studies of Naples, Italy and Guadeloupe, France, the historical case study analysis and the stakeholders’ interviews, workshops and focus groups discussions.

Multi-risk is a relatively new field in science, only partially developed in social and geosciences. The originality of this research is in establishment of a link between MRA, including both assessment and governance, and urban resilience. In this paper, the authors take a holistic and systemic look at the MRA, including all stages of knowledge generation and decision-making. Both, knowledge generation and decision-making are reinforced by behavioural biases, different perceptions and institutional factors. Further on, the authors develop recommendations on how an MRA can contribute to urban resilience.