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The authors wanted to find out if hiring temporary staff at busy A&E departments had a negative impact on the work of permanent staff.

They did semi-structured interviews with managers and permanent staff at two London NHS hospitals with different policies for hiring temps. Hospital A prioritized the use of NHS professions for its bank and agency nurses, as well as doctors and locums. Hospital B focused more on using its own internal bank staff as temps.

The findings showed the generally negative effect of using temporary staff on permanent staff. But the reaction of permanent staff depended on the type of temporary staff. More experienced temps could generally be trusted to get on with the job, whereas the inexperienced ones required more supervision.

The authors proposed an approach to improved practice beginning with “macro-level managers” who could maintain service quality as a higher priority than contracting costs. They could also encourage permanent staff to do occasional temporary shifts. The co-authors also felt that “meso-level managers” could be given the role of hiring “preferred temps” where possible.

Suggests that the task of ensuring a high level of staff motivation requires from library managers a range of managerial, sociological and psychological skills for which they have had very little training, if any at all. These include effective communication with staff, the encouragement of good workplace relationships, the involvement of staff in the decision making process, helping staff to come to terms with change, promoting job rotation, recognising and rewarding initiative and providing relevant training for staff.

Individuals with an autism spectrum condition (ASC) represent a small proportion of patients detained in high-secure psychiatric care (HSPC) with specific difficulties and needs. To date there has been little exploration of how these needs are viewed by staff or if staff have unmet needs with regard to working with ASCs. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A questionnaire examining specific views (on vulnerability, benefits from therapy and making adjustments to practise), knowledge and training needs linked to ASC was distributed to staff who directly worked with patients.

In total, 206 questionnaires were returned (approximately 60 per cent distributed). Most staff reported making adjustments in their practise and believed patients with an ASC were more vulnerable than other patient groups. Half of staff expressed the view, that whilst patients with an ASC benefited from therapies, they were unaware if an individual’s difficulties were considered in their care. Half of staff believed individuals with an ASC should be managed in a different way. Most staff reported not having adequate skills to work with ASC, a wish for more training and that such training should be mandatory. Other than psychiatrists most staff were unaware of the Autism Act (2009). The need for a specialist ASC ward within HSPC was also highlighted by several staff.

The survey highlights differences in staff experiences of patients with an ASC and view that autism training should be mandatory.

Whilst progress has been made with implementing the government’s Autism Strategy (2010) within HSPC, more awareness training is required in promoting staff confidence to work with this group of patients.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what existing literature about the care home environment for people with dementia reveals. It also evaluates the implications for practice, to show which parts of the care home environment staff feel have the most impact on the day to day lives of residents living with dementia. In turn, this paper seeks to feedback to care home management to improve practice and to contribute to research in care homes in the future.

A literature review forms the basis of this research, in addition to four semi-structured interview conducted with care home staff of different roles; allowing them to share their experiences with little restriction. Participants were recruited through informal discussions with the researcher before the research took place, as part of her job role and using purposive sampling.

Data were analysed using computer software Nvivo and identified four main categories which all participants discussed: social interaction, staff involvement, staff restrictions, staff involvement and physical elements of the environment. This research has shown the importance of staff presence in the care home environment to facilitate social interaction among residents with dementia.

The sample is very small due to staff not having the time to take part in the interview and this itself is a key finding. Interviews were able to capture feelings but not the overall experience of interaction between resident and staff, which observations would have achieved if there was more time to conduct the research.

A literature review and qualitative research signifying the importance of staff presence in the care home setting in order for the residents to socially engage in their environment. However, it has also show the lack of time that is face by staff and the impact this has on people living with dementia.

In many UK mental health services, in-patient psychiatric care is being separated from community care by having dedicated in-patient medical team. We evaluated staff satisfaction in this functionalised in-patient care. A survey was conducted amongst multidiscipli-nary staff from various teams using a questionnaire survey. On an average 14.3% of staff returned a satisfactory response for function-alisation, 57.3% had unsatisfactory response and others were undecided or perceived no change. There was no difference in responses amongst age, gender and professional groups. Mean scores of all groups were within unsatisfactory domain; however community staff compared to in-patient staff and staff with more than 5 years of experience compared to those with 1-5 years of experience returned significantly more unsatisfactory responses regarding functionalisation. Many positive and negative aspects of functionalisation were raised. The results of this evaluation suggest the need for further studies on the effectiveness of in-patient functionalisation. Short and long term clinical outcomes and the satisfaction of the patients should also be studied.

After outlining the unique functions of the Lending Division, the paper explains the interaction between it and the British Library as a whole. Policy‐making in such an organisation is complex and this is achieved by a series of meetings ranging from the British Library Board, which deals with major decisions for the whole Library, through senior management at the Lending Division holding regular meetings to discuss all aspects of its work to meetings between junior management with their staff, where minor and major problems can be ironed out. The staff structure of the Lending Division emphasises the low ratio of senior to junior staff. Because of its size and uniqueness the Lending Division pays particular attention to communications both within and without; internally this is achieved by meetings between various grades of staff and a Newsletter, externally by a number of publications, participation in conferences, extensive advisory machinery and the publication of its own journal.

Introduction This was the first comprehensive survey and analysis of UK university professorial and senior staff salaries. The survey was conducted by the AUT in response to membership demand for information on their salaries and in order to assess the support among professors and senior staff for a salary scale. The analysis of the results was carried out by the Polytechnic of North London (PNL) Social Research Unit.

Believes that an urgent need for in‐depth understanding of the relationship of staff development to education quality exists in current educational reforms, policy making, and teacher education. Based on the existing knowledge of education quality, quality management and effective schools, aims to propose a framework to show how staff development can be designed and managed to contribute to the assurance and enhancement of school education quality from the perspective of seven multimodels of school education quality. Different models emphasize different aspects of school education quality and propose different strategies to enhance it. For ensuring long‐term school education quality in a changing educational environment, staff development can be organized and managed according to the major concerns of multimodels. Proposes some practical considerations for designing and implementing school‐based staff development.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a commentary on Stocks and Slater’s paper, “Training in positive behavioural support: increasing staff self-efficacy and positive outcome expectations”.

This is a narrative review of staff training in positive behaviour support (PBS) and challenging behaviour, drawing on Stocks and Slater’s paper and the core staff competencies outlined in the PBS Competence Framework (PBS Coalition, 2015).

Taking into consideration multiple outcome measures, including staff outcomes such as self-efficacy, changes in staff behaviour, and the impact on quality of life for service users, may provide a broader insight into the effects of staff training. Supports and systems such as hands-on training, supervision, and practice leadership are also important factors that are likely to lead to positive service user and staff outcomes.

This commentary reflects on Stocks and Slater’s paper in the broader context of staff training outcomes and factors that contribute to high-quality services for people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.

With the aim of discovering the important factors in training staff to use newly installed automated circulation systems, libraries in New Zealand with such systems were sent a questionnaire in 1988. This asked questions about how libraries had trained staff to use the system, and the outcome of this training in terms of satisfaction with their decisions regarding training, and of sparseness of mistakes made by staff after implementation of the system. Three facets of the administration of training were vitally important: (1) The vendor of the system must be heavily involved in the training; (2) As many staff as possible must be given a detailed training in the whole system; (3) As much of the training as possible must be given before system implementation.