Search results

The purpose of this paper is to present a case study using a systemic team formulation approach, in the context of supporting a women with intellectual disabilities with a history of trauma.

A reflective stance is used to describe the process of assessment, hypothesising, formulation and intervention in a single case study design.

Feedback from care staff suggests that they found a team formulation approach helpful to improve their understanding of the service user they support.

The paper discusses how systemic team formulation can draw on trauma-informed care principles in the context of supporting an individual with an intellectual disability. Future research should aim to replicate the approach for findings to be applied more broadly. COVID-19 has meant clinical working has had to be adapted, clinicians should carefully consider how collaborative and meaningful work can continue to be facilitated within the current parameters.

This case study contributes to the literature in the use of systemic team formulation interventions within an intellectual disability context, drawing on trauma-informed care principles and reflecting on adapted working within the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is a growing evidence base for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) as a treatment for psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) in the general population. Despite the relatively high proportion of individuals with PNES who have an intellectual disability (ID) there is a paucity of literature on the use of CBT for PNES in this population. The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of an adapted CBT approach to treat PNES in a woman with mild ID.

The intervention used a CBT approach that included both the client and her mother, her primary care giver, throughout the therapy sessions. It involved 13 1-hour sessions over 20 weeks.

Over the course of the intervention the client experienced a reduction in seizure activity. Both the client and her mother reported increases in her perceived ability to cope with the seizures.

This report describes an adapted CBT-based intervention for individuals with PNES in the context of ID. It is the first report to include the involvement of a care-giver in adapting this approach for individuals with ID.

The Morgan Library at Colorado State University in Fort Collins suffered catastrophic flooding as the result of a historic rain storm and flood that swept through the town on July 28, 1997. This study examines this single library's organizational disaster response and identifies the phenomena that the library's employees cited as their motivation for innovation.

Purpose – This study provides an example of a library where a pre-disaster and post-disaster organizational environment was supportive of experimentation. This influenced the employees’ capacity and motivation to create a new tool meant to solve a temporary need. Their invention, a service now called RapidILL, advanced the Morgan Library organization beyond disaster recovery and has become an effective and popular consortium of libraries.

Design/methodology/approach – This is an instrumental case study. This design was chosen to examine the issues in organizational learning that the single case of Morgan Library presents. The researcher interviewed employees who survived the 1997 flood and who worked in the library after the disaster. The interview results and a book written by staff members are the most important data that form the basis for this qualitative research.

The interviews were transcribed, and key phrases and information from both the interviews and the published book were isolated into themes for coding. The coding allowed the use of NVivo 7, a text analysis software, to search in employees’ stories for “feeling” words and themes about change, innovation, motivation, and mental models.

Three research questions for the study sought to learn how employees described their lived experience, how the disaster altered their mental models of change, and what factors in the disaster response experience promoted learning and innovation.

Findings – This study investigates how the disruptive forces of disaster can influence and promote organizational learning and foster innovation. Analysis of the data demonstrates how the library employees’ feelings of trust before and following a workplace disaster shifted their mental models of change. They felt empowered to act and assert their own ideas; they did not simply react to change acting upon them.

Emotions motivate adaptive actions, facilitating change. The library employees’ lived experiences and feelings influenced what they learned, how quickly they learned it, and how that learning contributed to their innovations after the disaster. The library's supervisory and administrative leaders encouraged staff members to try out new ideas. This approach invigorated staff members’ feelings of trust and motivated them to contribute their efforts and ideas. Feeling free to experiment, they tapped their creativity and provided adaptations and innovations.

Practical implications – A disaster imposes immediate and often unanticipated change upon people and organizations. A disaster response urgently demands that employees do things differently; it also may require that employees do different things.

Successful organizations must become adept at creating and implementing changes to remain relevant and effective in the environments in which they operate. They need to ensure that employees generate and test as many ideas as possible in order to maximize the opportunity to uncover the best new thinking. This applies to libraries as well as to any other organizations.

If library leaders understand the conditions under which employees are most motivated to let go of fear and alter the mental models they use to interpret their work world, it should be possible and desirable to re-create those conditions and improve the ability of their organizations to tap into employees’ talent, spur innovation, and generate meaningful change.

Social implications – Trust and opportunities for learning can be central to employees’ ability to embrace change as a positive state in which their creativity flourishes and contributes to the success of the organization. When leaders support experimentation, employees utilize and value their affective connections as much as their professional knowledge. Work environments that promote experimentation and trust are ones in which employees at any rank feel secure enough to propose and experiment with innovative services, products, or workflows.

Originality/value – The first of its kind to examine library organizations, this study offers direct evidence to show that organizational learning and progress flourish through a combination of positive affective experiences and experimentation. The study shows how mental models, organizational learning, and innovation may help employees create significantly effective organizational advances while under duress.

An original formula is presented in Fig. 1.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how one hospital safety coordinator socially constructs a complete environment of care. Specifically, it applies Shotter's “practical author” framework to examine the author‐response interaction between the safety coordinator and other mid‐level supervisors.

Qualitative methodology is employed to examine this authorship. Data include printed materials employees receive upon hire, an observation of an environment of care orientation presentation, and semi‐structured interviews with the safety coordinator and mid‐level supervisors.

The paper reveals how the safety coordinator uses a variety of rhetorical strategies to balance the tensions between mandating compliance with environment of care requirements and facilitating buy‐in to the idea of compliance as a moral and ethical imperative. This creates an ethos among the employees where they feel authorized to go beyond the requirements and act on their own to construct a safer culture.

The paper has multiple practical and theoretical implications that may be useful to health care and other organizations when examining the broader need for a complete, supportive environment where employees not only comply with but actually live and believe in the values of their organizations' cultures. A limitation is that employee perspective and behavior are primarily inferred based on supervisor reports.

The paper extends theory on communication and developing organizational environments and provides practical application possibilities for organizations.

Work-based placements are central to the university education of allied health and social work (AHSW) students. As a result of COVID-19, the clinical learning environment of students' work-based placements was dramatically altered resulting in numerous documented challenges. This inter-disciplinary study aimed to evaluate AHSW students' perceptions and experiences of completing a diverse range of work-based placements during COVID-19.

This study was a mixed-method inter-disciplinary study using an anonymous online survey consisting of multiple choice, Likert scale and free text questions. Mixed-methods design supported amalgamation of insights from positivism and interpretivism perspectives and enabled research questions to be answered with both breadth and depth. 436 students were invited to participate who were enrolled in five AHSW educational university programmes: speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, radiation therapy and social work. Data collected was analysed using both quantitative (descriptive and analytical statistics) and qualitative (thematic analysis) methods.

118 students participated (response rate: 27%) representing a range of AHSW disciplines who attended diverse placement settings. While there was extensive disruption in the learning environment leading to increased levels of stress and concern, a triad of individual and systemic supports helped to ensure positive work-based placement experiences and student success for the majority of AHSW students during COVID-19: (1) university preparation and communication; (2) placement site and supervisor support; and (3) students' resilience and capacity to adapt to a changed work-place environment.

This inter-disciplinary study reports the work-based placement experiences from the professional education programmes of healthcare students during the COVID-19 pandemic, giving a unique view of their perspectives and learning during this unprecedented crisis.

The aim of this study was to explore and understand the leadership experiences of medical consultants prior to a major hospital move. Health and care is becoming increasingly complex and there is no greater challenge than the move to a new hospital. Effective leadership has been identified as being essential for successful transition. However, there is very little evidence of how medical consultants experience effective leadership.

A qualitative methodology was utilized with one-to-one semi-structured interviews conducted with ten medical consultants. These were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. The research complied with the consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research (COREQ).

Four themes were found to influence medical consultants’ experience of leadership: collaboration, patient centredness, governance and knowledge mobilization. Various factors were identified that negatively influenced their leadership effectiveness. The findings suggest that there are a number of factors that influence complexity leadership effectiveness. Addressing these areas may enhance leadership effectiveness and the experience of leadership in medical consultants.

This study provides a rich exploration of medical consultants’ experience of collective leadership prior to a transition to a new hospital and provides new understandings of the way collective leadership is experienced in the lead up to a major transition and makes recommendations for future leadership research and practice.

The findings suggest that there are a number of factors that influence complexity leadership effectiveness. Addressing these areas may enhance leadership effectiveness and the experience of leadership in medical consultants.

Clinical leadership is associated with better outcomes for patients therefore any interventions that enhance leadership capability will improve outcomes for patients and therefore benefit society.

This is the first research to explore medical consultants’ experience of collective leadership prior to a transition to a new hospital.

This article draws on the literature on valuation and evaluation and the orders of worth framework to consider the process of knowledge commercialization from academia to practice. Based on the study of two knowledge commercialization projects in a business school, the study contributes by showing how the orders of worth framework may assist in understanding the assignment of worth to knowledge-based objects in the context of multiple and potentially competing systems of valuation. The study also adds to the literature on the orders of worth framework by showing how “composite objects” or “assemblages” that achieve compromise or synergy (i.e., mutual reinforcement) between different value systems may be constructed and potentially sustained.

The purpose of this paper is to present The Build and Bond, an experiential exercise which engages student teams while they apply team dynamics, enhance team skills and foster team member interpersonal bonds.

During The Build and Bond, teams design and execute their own team-building activity. Specifically, teams set goals, generate ideas, make decisions, create a team-building activity, develop implementation plans and ultimately execute the activity. Finally, during an all-class debrief discussion, teams describe their team-building activities, connect their experiences to the learning objectives and reflect on how these lessons can be applied in future team experiences. Pretest and posttest surveys were used to determine if participants perceived increases in team performance and cohesion following The Build and Bond.

All teams reported that their activity added value, was preferred over an instructor-assigned team-building activity and improved team states. Findings from t-tests supported an improvement in team performance and cohesion.

The Build and Bond is designed to help students feel more equipped to communicate, have fun and work interdependently with current and future team members.

Teams design the team-building activity themselves, so members are often more interested in participating and engaging during the team-building activity.

This chapter explores the contribution of The Open University (OU) Library to influencing curriculum decisions about embedding digital and information literacies in an online environment. Recommendations can be applied to higher education (HE) institutions as they develop permanent e-learning strategies to prepare for a long-term solution to online learning experiences. Learning providers are creating strategies for online content creation, student engagement, and skills development. It is an opportunity to demonstrate their value by making an effective transition to online learning, streamlining services to create student-centered experiences.

It investigates existing e-pedagogical approaches developed pre- and during the COVID-19 pandemic to embedding digital literacies in practice, drawing on the OU’s experience of developing effective frameworks for online teaching programs. The aim is to review institutional preparedness for effective transition, so that staff members and students can adapt to post-COVID realities. This draws upon student-centered, holistic design of programs to embed accessible and inclusive processes in distance learning, utilizing technological solutions to create optimal teaching and learning environments.

It will also make recommendations about how embedding digital literacies within the curriculum will equip graduates for post-education experiences within working and social contexts, by building activities into module that develop digital capabilities. For effective learning experiences to take place, institutions require development of born-digital support material to develop staff confidence and ability to produce effective, accessible online learning objects. As more organizations move to online, hybrid, and flipped learning interventions, high-level university strategy can future-proof learning design by developing the support that staff need to provide the best experiences for their learners.