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When using a service, customers often develop their own solutions by integrating resources to solve problems and co-create value. Drawing on innovation and creativity literature, this paper aims to investigate the influence of place (the service setting and the customer setting) on customer creativity in a health-care context.

In a field study using customer diaries, 200 ideas from orthopedic surgery patients were collected and evaluated by an expert panel using the consensual assessment technique (CAT).

Results suggest that place influences customer creativity. In the customer setting, customers generate novel ideas that may improve their clinical health. In the service setting, customers generate ideas that may improve the user value of the service and enhance the customer experience. Customer creativity is influenced by the role the customer adopts in a specific place. In the customer setting customers were more likely to develop ideas involving active customer roles. Interestingly, while health-care customers provided ideas in both settings, contrary to expectation, ideas scored higher on user value in the service setting than in the customer setting.

This study shows that customer creativity differs in terms of originality, user value and clinical value depending on the place (service setting or customer setting), albeit in one country in a standardized care process.

The present research puts customer creativity in relation to health-care practices building on an active patient role, suggesting that patients can contribute to the further development of health-care services.

As the first field study to test the influence of place on customer creativity, this research makes a novel contribution to the growing body of work in customer creativity, showing that different places are more/less favorable for different dimensions of creativity. It also relates customer creativity to health-care practices and highlights that patients are an untapped source of creativity with first-hand knowledge and insights, importantly demonstrating how customers can contribute to the further development of health-care services.

The Avon & Western Wiltshire NHS Trust's Work Development Programme in Bristol is a Beacon award winner. This Department of Health award has been made for achievements in establishing a comprehensive vocational advice and support service for people with mental health difficulties ‐ starting from inside specialist mental health services. The funding attached is to enable the model and good practice to be shared more widely in the NHS. Central to the service model are close partnerships with occupational therapy as well as the employment service, further education and service providers from the voluntary sector. Roger Butterworth (who started it) and Jo Dean describe how the service was developed.

Many studies have shown that an unfavourable psychosocial environment increases the risk of mental and physical illness, as well as absenteeism, or sickness absence. However, more costly than absenteeism is presenteeism, where a person is present at work even though disabled by a mental or physical illness. We sought to identify factors explaining why workers would come to work even when their health is impaired. In a cross‐sectional design data were collected from 3825 employees of a Canadian organisation. The results show a high occurrence of presenteeism: workers went to work in spite of illness 50% of the time. Presenteeism propensity (the percentage of days worked while ill over total number of sick days) was higher for workers who were ill more often. Heavier workloads, higher skill discretion, harmonious relationships with colleagues, role conflict and precarious job status increased presenteeism, but decision authority did not. Workers reporting high psychological distress and more severe psychosomatic complaints were also more likely to report higher rates of presenteeism. These results suggest that stress research should not only include absenteeism as an outcome indicator, but also consider presenteeism.

Patient-centric exchanges, a major type of Health Information Exchange (HIE), empower patients to aggregate and manage their health information. This exchange model helps patients access, modify and share their medical information with multiple healthcare organizations. Although existing studies examine patient engagement, more research is required to investigate patients' attitudes and willingness to play an active role in patient-centered information exchange. The study's main objective is to develop a model based on the belief-attitude-intention paradigm to empirically examine the effects of patients' attitudes toward engagement in care on their willingness to participate in patient-centric HIE.

The authors conducted an online survey study to identify the antecedents and consequences of patients' attitudes toward engagement in care. To empirically test the research model, the authors collected data from a national sample (n = 357) of individuals in the United States. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The proposed model categorizes the antecedents to patients' attitudes toward engagement in patient-related and healthcare system factors. The results show that patient-related factors (perceived health literacy and perceived coping ability) and health system factors (perceived experience with the healthcare organization and perceived patient-provider interaction) significantly shape patient attitude toward care management engagement. The results indicate that patients' attitudes toward engaging in their healthcare significantly contribute to their willingness to participate in medical information sharing through patient-centric HIE initiatives. Moreover, the authors’ findings also demonstrate that the link between patient engagement and willingness to participate in HIE is stronger for individuals who perceive lower levels of privacy and security concerns.

The authors validate the proposed model explaining patients' perceptions about their characteristics and the healthcare system significantly influence their attitude toward engaging in their care. This study also suggests that patients' favorable attitude toward engagement can bring patient-centric HIE efforts onto a path to success. The authors’ research attempts to shed light on the importance of patients' roles in adopting patient-centric HIE initiatives. Theoretical and practical contributions of this study are noticeable since they could result in a deeper understanding of the concept of patient engagement and how it may affect healthcare services in an evolving digital world. The authors’ findings can help healthcare organizations provide public citizen-centric services by introducing user-oriented approaches in healthcare delivery systems.

Reimbursement of the Israeli sick funds, whose status as both insurers and providers of health care is unique, warrants much attention. The paper deals with the issue in detail. Four main channels for reimbursement are discussed: premium payment from members, co‐payments from members, parallel tax payments from the members' employer, and direct government subsidies. For each source, pros and cons are evaluated and suggestions are made for improvement of the reimbursement process in the future.

This paper contends that dysfunctional patterns of communication can develop in family aged care dyads in response to stereotypical role expectations in the caregiving‐carereceiving relationship, thus giving rise to a role predicament of caring. If this argument holds it follows that more productive and effective forms of communication and relationship are dependent upon both members of the aged care dyad understanding the expectations of their role and if necessary reconstructing them. Part 1 of this two part conceptual paper develops the Communication Predicament of Ageing Model to include role expectations. The conceptions are grounded in important conclusions drawn from data contained in a large comprehensive study of older people and their family caregivers. Part 2 of the paper (to be published in the next issue of Quality in Ageing) introduces the health promoting communication model which was developed as a framework for guiding both prevention and intervention strategies to prevent or transform a role predicament of caring.

The purpose of this paper is to seek a deeper understanding of presenteeism by utilising the perspective of job crafting to explore how a selected group of physicians make sense of their decision to attend work while ill and of their experience of doing so. Job crafting implies that employees not only respond to their job description, but also proactively change tasks, relationships and perceptions in order to experience work in meaningful ways.

A narrative methodological framework involving interviews was adopted to explore the ways in which a selected group of 20 Norwegian hospital physicians engaged in job crafting during presenteeism. The resulting data were analysed using theory-led thematic analysis utilizing the theoretical perspective of job crafting.

It was evident that physicians were indecisive and insecure when evaluating their own illness, and that, via task, relational and cognitive crafting, they trivialised, endured and showcased their illness, and engaged in presenteeism in various ways. Furthermore, physicians to some extent found themselves caught in dysfunctional circles by contributing to the creation of a work environment where presenteeism was maintained and seen as expected.

Future research should address a wider range of contexts, and use longitudinal methods to explore the multifaceted, context-specific and evolving nature of presenteeism and job crafting in more depth. Interventions aimed at countering the negative implications of presenteeism should address the issue from both a social and a systemic point of view.

The findings extend the current understanding of presenteeism by demonstrating the multifaceted and evolving nature of the ways in which personal illness and presenteeism are perceived and enacted over time.

There has been extensive growth in the employment of mental health peer support workers (PSWs) over the last decade. However, limited research exists when exploring how PSWs make sense of the transition of entering and enacting the role. The purpose of this paper is to explore the lived experience of NHS employed PSWs’ transition from their own experiences of mental health problems to provide a service to support individuals with their mental health problems.

The study used purposive sampling to recruit seven participants who were individually interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).

Three superordinate themes were identified: fluctuating identities, PSW role and organisational culture. These were interpreted as interdependent with interrelating subordinate themes.

Participants considered the complex, idiosyncratic and changeable nature of the transitions and the impact on their individual, interpersonal and collective identities. Emotional and practical support appeared to assist the transition whilst competing roles and blurred boundaries constrained the enactment of the new role. Implications for practice and research are provided.

Reports on original research and adds to the sparse UK literature in this area.

Presents extracts from the stories of mid‐career women who have unseen chronic illness, exemplifying numerous gender and work‐related issues. Uses Heideggerian phenomenology to understand the experience of being a woman with an unseen illness, who also works full time. Eight women were interviewed. These women were seen to reside “in‐between” wellness and sickness, junior and senior organisational roles, and home and work responsibilities. They shared some of the difficulties they have faced. First, were problems influenced by the medical community as associated with getting a diagnosis. Given their full‐time career responsibilities, this was interpreted as being problematic. There were also related problems reported about colleagues assuming, because of their healthful appearance, that nothing was the matter and acting accordingly. The “woman’s role”, as experienced by sick women who also worked full time, added to their struggle to continue careers, care for others and attempt to attend to their own health. Illness, especially invisible illness, is rarely examined through the combined lens of workplace and gender.

In advancing the academic discourse around the theory of field, place and space in ethnographic research, this paper proposes a carnal sociological reading of the meaning and form of the Lindsay Leg Clubs – third-sector community leg care centres for older adults with leg problems – as a therapeutic space-construct.

The paper draws on non-formulaic, polymorphic ethnographic research in the UK Lindsay Leg Clubs conducted through multiple on-site and extramural engagements with the Leg Club community between 2019 and 2023 and an interview with the Leg Club founder and president, Professor Ellie Lindsay OBE. Wacquant's (2015) reflexive, enactive ethnographic approach is applied to develop an intellectual and carnal know-how of Leg Clubs as therapeutic space-constructs.

The researcher's “flesh and blood” experience of the Leg Clubs reveals the importance of cognitive and embodied appreciation of sounds, smells, sights, movements, the structures of wound stigma, centre-stage physical bodies of members and the volunteers, the material arrangement of the place and the researcher's own visceral and intellectual, biographical relation to the fieldwork to understand the therapeutic form and meaning of Leg Club spaces.

Applying the carnal sociology approach to reveal the therapeutic form and meaning of the Leg Club spaces makes concrete the abstract distinctions between field, place and space in ethnographic research, hence advancing the discourse around the theory of field in ethnography. A carnal sociological reading of the Leg Club spaces has implications for an embodied understanding of broader community care spaces.