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Against a background of an ageing population, rising emergency admissions and a policy direction moving towards providing care in the least intensive setting, this paper presents the dramatic results achieved in a 22‐week pilot of undivided health and social care replicating the Castlefields study and using Unique Care principles. In the context of practice‐based commissioning, where GP practices develop and commission services that represent the best model of care and use of resources for their patients, the potential for creating savings from this approach are discussed.

The Improvement Foundation's Healthy Communities Collaborative (HCC) model combines community development and quality improvement, lay knowledge and professional support in an innovative community‐led approach aimed specifically at reducing health inequalities. This paper describes the key characteristics of the model and uses an outcomes framework to discuss indicative results from an HCC initiative to promote earlier identification of people at risk of cardiovascular disease, implemented in nine spearhead local authorities.

This paper describes the first year of a national programme supporting implementation of one of the key policy initiatives forming part of the programme of health reform in England, practice‐based commissioning (PBC). The paper presents an audit of service redesign initiatives based on the first six months' work of 27 sites in the first wave of the programme, and discusses the early practical learning about the implementation of PBC by both participants and stakeholders. The role of the programme in facilitating two‐way links between policy development and practical implementation is highlighted, and the development of the programme, and other parallel learning routes, to meet the emerging needs of particular groups in relation to practice‐based commissioning is described.

Describes an audit of inter‐profession communications among hospital, community health and social services concerning hospital admission. Information from 150 patient admissions (50 from each of three general practices after a target date) was gathered from both community and hospital sources. The results were used to audit the transfer policy operated by Airedale NHS Trust. The audit design incorporated an element of research, the results of which were used to inform the interpretation of the audit results and to suggest appropriate recommendations for change. Recommendations included the introduction of a pre‐admissions checklist, specific changes to the nursing documentation, measures to improve the speed of information transfer, and the clarification of responsibilities for initiating contact across the hospital‐community interface when patients with existing contacts in community services are admitted to hospital. Concludes that the introduction of supplementary research to an otherwise traditional audit cycle strengthened the resulting recommendations.

As Lindsay (1994, 1995) encourages validation of existing results, this research replicates Guilding and McManus (2002) in a New Zealand (NZ) context. The usage and perceived merit of customer accounting practices were lower in NZ than in the Australian study. Few of the regressions where customer accounting usage and perceived merit were dependent variables revealed a statistically significant role for competition intensity and market orientation. There was some minor support for the perceived merit of customer accounting being higher in companies experiencing medium levels of competition intensity.

The Australian banking industry has undergone fast and dramatic change in response to deregulation and globalisation of financial markets. The release of the Wallis Report on the Australian financial industry in March 1997 signalled that this rate of change can be expected to continue into the twenty‐first century. This study was carried out on one proje ct, part of an organisation‐wide reengineering programme in a major Australian bank and examined the link between corporate strategy and implementation of an IT‐supported change project. Results highlight the need for careful co‐ordination of organisational, technology and departmental strategies when carrying out major change programmes, and the importance of user training for effective use of the system.

Governmental agencies are interested in improving the quality of their service delivery. One tool that has been used to manage their performance is performance based reward schemes (PBRS). The aim of this paper is to examine the degree to which a sample of these plans, used within the Botswana public sector, is customer-focused. Being more customer-focused should deliver improved public sector service quality.

This study carried out an evaluation of a sample of Botswana PBRS plans, using multidimensional content analysis undertaken by four expert “evaluators”, to identify the degree to which the PBRS were customer-focused.

Classifying PBRS plans as being customer-focused was difficult, as the plans had few objectives related to customer experiences or outcomes. Those that did had poorly defined performance objectives, their targets were not specific, or there was limited explicit role responsibility. Thus, PBRS plans seemed not to focus on improving customer outcomes.

The PBRS evaluated do not appear to be customer-focused and, thus, would have limited ability to improve customer experiences (i.e. public sector quality). Further research is needed in other countries to see whether these results are generalisable, and whether service levels vary with more customer-focused PBRS plans.

The results suggest improvements that could be adopted by organisations seeking to make their PBRS schemes customer-focused.

Extensive research suggests that PBRS plans can be used to improve service quality. Most of the studies have focused on the employees' perspectives and have not looked at the degree of customer orientation within the plans.

Against a British policy backdrop, which places an ever- increasing emphasis on workplace learning in pre-service professional programmes, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the contribution of the mentor to professional knowledge development in nursing, paramedicine, social work and teaching.

Taking the form of a literature review, it explores the influence of policy, professional and theoretical conceptualisations of the mentor role, and structural factors influencing the mentor’s contribution to professional knowledge.

Where there are clearly delineated policy obligations for the mentor to “teach”, mentors are more likely to make connections between theoretical and practical knowledge. When this responsibility is absent or informal, they are inclined to attend to the development of contextual knowledge with a consequent disconnect between theory and practice. In all four professions, mentors face significant challenges, especially with regard to the conflict between supporting and assessor roles, and the need to attend to heavy contractual workloads, performance targets and mentoring roles in tandem.

The authors argue first for the need for more attention to the pedagogy of mentoring, and second for structural changes to workload allocations, career progression and mentoring education. In order to develop more coherent and interconnected professional knowledge between different domains, and the reconciliation of different perspectives, it would be useful to underpin mentoring pedagogy with Bhabba’s notion of “third space”.

The paper makes a contribution to the field since it considers new obligations incumbent on mentors to assist mentees in reconciling theoretical and practical knowledge by the consequence of policy and also takes a multi-professional perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to present George Kelly's The Psychology of Personal Constructs and to discuss how Repertory Grid Technique can aid a better understanding of friends and members in an arts marketing context.

The project is a phenomenological study drawing on Kelly's The Psychology of Personal Constructs. The author conducted 16 unstructured face‐to‐face interviews across the UK during 2007 with individuals who were friends or members of at least five heritage supporter groups as part of a larger mixed methods study. The interviews included the building of Repertory Grids.

Analysis of the Repertory Grids gives a detailed understanding of participants' perceptions of, and involvement in, heritage supporter groups. Five themes emerged from the analysis: Organization; Engagement with the Organization; Involvement; Motivation; and Relationships with other members.

The paper provides a rich understanding of the portfolio of memberships that individuals have and of how they perceive and interact with them.

The paper contributes to the arts marketing literature methodologically by illustrating how to use Repertory Grid Technique in an arts marketing context and by focusing on friends and members, whose perspectives the academic literature does not cover extensively.

The Howard Shuttering Contractors case throws considerable light on the importance which the tribunals attach to warnings before dismissing an employee. In this case the tribunal took great pains to interpret the intention of the parties to the different site agreements, and it came to the conclusion that the agreed procedure was not followed. One other matter, which must be particularly noted by employers, is that where a final warning is required, this final warning must be “a warning”, and not the actual dismissal. So that where, for example, three warnings are to be given, the third must be a “warning”. It is after the employee has misconducted himself thereafter that the employer may dismiss.