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This study investigates the role of leadership and cultural transformation in facilitating Lean Six Sigma (LSS) practices in clinical pharmacy settings to reduce medicine waste within the UK National Health Services (NHS).

A systematic literature review on Lean Six Sigma in health care was conducted to develop an analytical framework. This was followed by a qualitative case study of an English NHS trust to test the framework, exploring pharmacists' adoption of LSS practices and their impact on staff behaviour, focussing on leadership decisions and organisational culture.

The research highlights the significance of leadership’s prioritisation in waste reduction efforts and its influence on staff engagement. It also examines the intricate relationship between leadership decisions, education and training, resource allocation, and the prevailing clinical culture, which shapes pharmacists' behaviours and attitudes towards LSS practices and waste reduction.

The study’s focus on a single NHS trust limits the generalisability of the findings, suggesting the need for further research across different healthcare settings.

The study recommends a cultural transformation, earlier training, and reformation in service strategy to enhance the adoption of LSS practices and contribute to a more sustainable future for the wider health services.

Effective medicine waste management prevents harm and helps address the current NHS medicine shortage. The NHS can allocate resources efficiently, ensure timely treatment, and prepare for future disruptions by implementing the proposed framework.

We developed a leadership model for the NHS to reduce medicine waste, offering a novel approach to addressing the challenge of medicine waste through leadership and cultural transformation.

The purpose of this study is to revisit the conventional wisdom about a key contribution [i.e. strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis] in the field of strategic management. The societal context and the role of academics, consultants and executives is taken into account in the emergence of SWOT analysis during the 1960–1980 period as a pivotal development within the broader context of the satisfactory, opportunities, faults, threats (SOFT) approach. The authors report on both the content and the approach, so that other scholars seeking to invigorate indigenous theories and/or underreported strategy practices will thrive.

Applying a historiographic approach, the authors introduce an evidence-based methodology for interpreting historical sources. This methodology incorporates source criticism, triangulation and hermeneutical interpretation, drawing upon insights from robust evidence through three iterative stages.

The underreporting of the SOFT approach/SWOT analysis can be attributed to several factors, including strategy tools being integrated into planning frameworks rather than being published as standalone materials; restricted circulation of crucial long-range planning service/theory and practice of planning reports due to copyright limitations; restricted access to the Stanford Research Institute Planning Library in California; and the enduring popularity of SOFT and SWOT variations, driven in part by their memorable acronyms.

In the spirit of a renaissance in strategic planning research, the authors unveil novel theoretical and social connections in the emergence of SWOT analysis by combining evidence from both theory and practice and delving into previously unexplored areas.

Caution is advised for scholars who examine the discrete time frame of 1960–1980 through mere bibliometric techniques. This study underscores the risks associated with gathering incomplete and/or inaccurate data, emphasizing the importance of triangulating evidence beyond scholarly databases. The paradigm shift of strategic management research due to the advent of large language models poses new challenges and the risk of conserving and perpetuating academic urban legends, myths and lies if training data is not adequately curated.

The study aims to explore how healthcare workers (HCWs) navigate and experience time when caring for older cancer patients living with other illnesses.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of how HCWs conceptualise and navigate the temporal aspects of delivering personalised care to older people living with multimorbidity. Building on research from organisation studies and the sociology of time, we interviewed 19 UK HCWs about their experiences of delivering care to this patient group.

Our findings illustrate how the delivery of personalised care contradicts contemporary models for healthcare delivery defined by efficiency and standardisation. We found that HCWs engage with time as both a valuable commodity to be rationed and prioritised within a constrained context and as a malleable resource for managing workload and overcoming “turbulence” in the system. However, participants in this study also shared how the simultaneous multiplicity and lack of time had a profoundly personal impact on them through the emotional toll associated with “time debt” and “lost” time.

This research presents a unique analysis of how time is conceptualised and navigated in contemporary healthcare, offering valuable insights for policy improvement. We conclude that personalised models of healthcare are incompatible with many current temporal structures of treatment trajectories and work-practices, by nature of being centred around the person and not the system of delivery.