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This paper reports on the evaluation of a scheme to promote service user involvement in the care delivered by a mental health trust. A case study methodology was employed to describe the particularity of the scheme in context as experienced by service users and staff involved in its delivery. Mixed methods of semi‐structured interviews and focus groups created the opportunity for all stakeholders to engage in action research through a mutual learning process about the scheme in operation with a view to making changes to improve and develop it in the future. The qualitative data collected was content analysed and grouped according to key themes, which included the benefits of the scheme, the conditions for it to work successfully, suggested changes, limitations of the scheme, and service user involvement generally in a hospital setting. The role of service users as both paid scheme co‐ordinators and volunteer representatives highlights the contribution that people who use mental health services can play in influencing service delivery when employed in relevant and appropriate roles within a mental health organisation.

The aim of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the current issues about support planning within personal budgets (PBs) for disabled and older people.

The paper is based on data from a round of professional workshops in five local authorities, which represented the first stage of a research study about support planning. Focus group discussions were held with participants from voluntary sector organisations (VSOs), as well as social services participants, and the paper is based on a thematic analysis of those discussions.

While there was considerable agreement about the desired outcomes for personal budget users, and the ingredients of good support planning, some major concerns were voiced about current constraints. Budgetary cuts were felt to impinge negatively on support planning, and conflicts were identified for social services between the facilitation of PB users’ choices, and the need to keep budgets limited. Support planning was often being re‐colonised by social services, and VSOs felt that their own role was being curtailed. Some suggestions were made about equalising the power relationships between social services, VSOs and PB users themselves.

These workshops represent five local authority areas which volunteered to take part in research, building on existing good practices in support for PB users. The obstacles they identified are likely to be very general ones, and need to be addressed by strategic solutions at national and local level.

This paper aims to describe an effort to provide for a robust and secure software development paradigm intended to support DevSecOps in a naval aviation enterprise (NAE) software support activity (SSA), with said paradigm supporting strong traceability and provability concerning the SSA’s output product, known as an operational flight program (OFP). Through a secure development environment (SDE), each critical software development function performed on said OFP during its development has a corresponding record represented on a blockchain.

An SDE is implemented as a virtual machine or container incorporating software development tools that are modified to support blockchain transactions. Each critical software development function, e.g. editing, compiling, linking, generates a blockchain transaction message with associated information embedded in the output of a said function that, together, can be used to prove integrity and support traceability. An attestation process is used to provide proof that the toolchain containing SDE is not subject to unauthorized modification at the time said critical function is performed.

Blockchain methods are shown to be a viable approach for supporting exhaustive traceability and strong provability of development system integrity for mission-critical software produced by an NAE SSA for NAE embedded systems software.

A blockchain-based authentication approach that could be implemented at the OFP point-of-load would provide for fine-grain authentication of all OFP software components, with each component or module having its own proof-of-integrity (including the integrity of the used development tools) over its entire development history.

Many SSAs have established control procedures for development such as check-out/check-in. This does not prove the SSA output software is secure. For one thing, a build system does not necessarily enforce procedures in a way that is determinable from the output. Furthermore, the SSA toolchain itself could be attacked. The approach described in this paper enforces security policy and embeds information into the output of every development function that can be cross-referenced to blockchain transaction records for provability and traceability that only trusted tools, free from unauthorized modifications, are used in software development. A key original concept of this approach is that it treats assigned developer time as a transferable digital currency.