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There is considerable literature about the impact of mentoring on the mentees but little is known about the effect of the mentoring relationship on the mentor. This paper aims to address that gap.

Interviews with 15 mentors and survey responses from 128 mentees are used to examine a formal mentoring programme. Most emphasis is on the perspective of the mentors, raising questions about how they view outcomes for themselves and their mentees, as well as the effects of mentoring on the workplace culture over time. Questions about the mentoring relationship, including gender differences, are analysed against the background of a decade‐long organisational change strategy.

Mentors report significant benefits for themselves and the mentee as well as the organisation itself as a result of their participation. The findings suggest that a long‐term mentoring programme for women has the potential to be an effective organisational change intervention. In particular, men involved in that programme increased their understanding and sensitivity regarding gendering processes in the workplace.

The importance of the impact of mentoring programmes on the mentors is an under‐investigated area. This study suggests that programme design, together with careful selection and targeting of mentors, enables mentoring to become a critical part of a culture change strategy.

The paper assists academics and practitioners to conceive of mentoring as a core element in an effective organisational change intervention. The innovation is to move mentoring away from assuming a deficit model of the mentee. As this programme shows, a focus on what needs to change in the dominant organisational culture, practices and values can lead to key players in the organisation becoming actively involved in the needed change process.

The purpose of this paper is to indicate the policy thinking that underpins the statutory provisions on adult safeguarding in the Care Act 2014.

The paper draws out the key themes and features of the Care Act that are relevant to safeguarding adults.

The author articulates the key messages from the Care Act regarding safeguarding adults.

As new legislation, the impact of these changes is yet to be established.

The paper summarises aspects of the statutory guidance which all agencies are required to comply with.

The paper emphasises the involvement of people in safeguarding enquiries.

The author is the policy lead at the Department of Health for adult safeguarding.

Serious Case Reviews (SCRs, now Safeguarding Adults Reviews (SARs)) may be held at local level in England when a vulnerable adult dies or is harmed, and abuse or neglect is suspected, and there is cause for concern about multi-agency safeguarding practice. There has been no analysis of SCRs focussing on pressure ulcers. The purpose of this paper is to present findings from a documentary analysis of SCRs/SARs to investigate what recommendations are made about pressure ulcer prevention and treatment in a care home setting in the context of safeguarding. This analysis is presented in cognisance of the prevalence and risks of pressure ulcers among care home residents; and debates about the interface of care quality and safeguarding systems.

Identification of SCRs and SARs from England where the person who died or who was harmed had a pressure ulcer or its synonym. Narrative and textual analysis of documents summarising the reports was used to explore the Reviews’ observations and recommendations. The main themes were identified.

The authors located 18 relevant SCRs and 1 SAR covering pressure ulcer care in a care home setting. Most of these inquiries into practice, service communications and the events leading up to the death or harm of care home residents with pressure ulcers observed that there were failings in the care home, but also in the wider health and care systems. Overall, the reports reveal specific failings in multi-agency communication and in quality of care. Pressure ulcers featured in several SCRs, but it is problems and inadequacies with care and treatment that moved them to the safeguarding arena. The value of examining pressure ulcers as a key line of inquiry is that they are “visible” in the system, with consensus about what they are, how to measure them and what constitutes optimal care and treatment. In the new Care Act 2014 context they may continue to feature in safeguarding enquiries and investigations as they may be possible symptoms of system failures.

Reviews vary in content, structure and accessibility making it hard to compare their approach, findings and recommendations. There are risks in drawing too many conclusions from the corpus of Reviews since these are not published in full and contexts have subsequently changed. However, this is the first analysis of these documents to take pressure ulcers as the focus and it offers valuable insights into care home practices amid other systems and professional activity.

This analysis highlights that it is not inevitably poor quality care in a care home that gives rise to pressure ulcers among residents. Several SCRs note problems in wider communications with healthcare providers and their engagement. Nonetheless, poor care quality and negligence were reported in some cases. Various policies have commented on the potential overlap between the raising of concerns about poor quality care and about safeguarding. These were highlighted prior to the Care Act 2014 although current policy views problems with pressure ulcers more as care quality and clinical concerns.

The value of this documentary analysis is that it rests on real case examples and scrutiny at local level. Future research could consider the findings of SARs, similar documents from the rest of the UK, and international perspectives.

The value of having a set of documents about adult safeguarding is that they lend themselves to analysis and comparison. This first analysis to focus on pressure ulcers addresses wider considerations related to safeguarding policy and practice.

This paper aims to understand the motivations behind married men preferring sons and to quantify the association between a couple’s stated son preferences. Son preference is an endemic problem in India. With half a million female foetuses aborted each year, the root causes of son preference in India have been widely studied. Little is known, however, on how couples mutually decide on their desired child sex-ratio.

Using data from the third National Family and Health Survey, the authors apply three-stage least square and optimal general method of moment methods to demonstrate association. Robustness checks are performed on plausibly exogenous instrumental variables and selection issues in the marriage market.

The authors show that their spouse's son preference is by far the most significant factor associated with a person's own stated son preference. The association between spouse's stated son preference is observed only for couples being married for three to five years. It is postulated that this is the critical period when sex-selective abortion decisions are being made.

The focus of existing empirical studies is nearly always on the mother's son preference only. The hypothesis is that spouses mutually influence each other’s preferences and models estimating determinants of son preference should include preferences of both spouses. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to understand the motivations of married men towards preferring sons and quantify the association between spouse's stated son preference and respondent's stated son preference.

Imprisoned mothers are at increased risk for poor psychological health and psychological distress when separated from their children, so staff need to be highly skilled to support the women. However, there is a paucity of research focusing on staff experiences around sensitive issues such as mother–child separation. This study aims to understand the challenges faced by staff and how these might be addressed.

This qualitative interview study explored the views and experiences of 24 prison-based staff in England working with female prisoners separated from their infants.

Staff emphasised the challenges of working with separated mothers, specifically the emotional impact of this work, and the impact of the wider criminal justice system on their sense of agency.

A focus on the experience of separation highlights the broader problem of incarcerating women in general. Reducing the number of mother–child separations would mitigate the impact on both women and staff.

This paper aims to highlight the factors influencing the conceptualisation of return on investment (ROI) from healthcare quality improvement (QI) programmes.

In their previous work, the authors found that the concept of ROI from QI is broad and includes numerous internal and external benefits for organisations. In this paper, the authors developed a framework outlining the factors that influence this conceptualisation of QI-ROI from an institutional theory perspective. The framework is based on the synthesis of their serial studies on the determinants of the concept of ROI from QI. The research was performed from 2020–2023 and involved a global multidisciplinary systematic literature review (N = 68), qualitative interviews (N = 16) and a Delphi study (N = 23). The qualitative and Delphi studies were based on the publicly-funded mental healthcare in UK. Participants included board members, clinical and service directors, as well as QI leaders.

The authors outline a framework of internal and external institutional forces that influence the conceptualisation of ROI from QI programmes in mental healthcare and similar organisations. Based on these factors, the authors state several conjectures. In doing this, the authors highlight the ambiguities and uncertainties surrounding QI-ROI conceptualisation. These challenge leaders to balance various monetary and non-monetary benefits for organisations and health systems. This explains the broadness of the QI-ROI concept.

The authors developed a framework highlighting the forces underpinning the broad, ambiguous and sometimes uncertain nature of the QI-ROI concept. They raise awareness about dilemmas to be confronted in developing or applying any tool to evaluate the value for money of QI programmes. Specifically, the work highlights the limitations of the ROI methodology as a primary tool in the QI context and the need for a more comprehensive tool.

Recognizes the need for computer programs which provide simple, user‐friendly techniques by which individuals can assess their diet. To this end the Nutri‐Test Computer Software was developed to raise awareness in users of the need to increase the percentage of energy derived from carbohydrate and to decrease the percentage of energy derived from fat in the UK diet. The Nutri‐Test was validated by comparing results with those obtained from a five‐day food diary. Results indicate that data obtained using the Nutri‐Test software and the food diary were very similar, inspiring confidence in the accuracy and reliability of the Nutri‐Test.

This chapter investigated tactics used by customer service employees in performing emotion work during their interactions with customers and those internal to organizations. Based on a qualitative study in the hospitality industry, I discovered that customer service employees used a range of tactics that impact different phases of the emotion regulation process in order to facilitate emotion work. One group of tactics was directed towards the work context while the other was self-directed in an attempt to regulate the experience and expression of emotion. Taken together these two groups of tactics provide a holistic portrayal of the range of tactics used by customer service employees in performing emotion work.