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People who are living with dementia are core health service users, but there are ongoing concerns about the quality of their care and the need for improved education of healthcare staff. The purpose of this paper is to report a qualitative study that investigated staff perspectives on an ethnodrama (“Barbara’s Story”) which was used to educate an entire health service workforce and promote a person-centred approach to care.

The study used a qualitative, longitudinal design with focus groups held with clinical (nurses, allied health professionals, medical) and non-clinical staff. In Phase 1 there were ten focus groups (n=67 participants) and one individual interview. In Phase 2 there were 16 focus groups (n=77 participants) and three individual interviews.

Barbara’s Story raised awareness of dementia, engaged staff emotionally and prompted empathetic responses and improved interactions. The project’s senior leadership, whole organisation and mandatory approach were well-supported, with a perceived impact on organisational culture. The project helped to embed practice developments and initiatives to support person-centred care. Barbara’s Story is now well-integrated into the organisation’s practices, supporting its sustainability in use.

Whilst there are increasing resources for educating about dementia, there are fewer evaluations, particularly for large-scale educational initiatives, and a lack of focus on long-term effects. The study findings indicate that education about dementia can be delivered to a whole workforce in a sustainable manner, to prompt empathy, raise awareness, support person-centred care and impact on individual behaviour and organisational culture.

This index covers all issues between February 2005 (Volume 9, Issue 1) and November 2008 (Volume 12, Issue 4). Numbers in bold refer to yolume, numbers in brackets refer to issue, with subsequent numbers to pages.

This chapter provides an overview of the Department of Defense (DoD) laboratory structure to help equipment designers, modelers, and manufacturers determine where research, testing programs, or relevant findings can be found. The chapter includes a discussion of the performance measures and metrics typically used in DoD laboratories and concludes by considering the current state-of-the-art as well as the state-of-the-possible for human performance measurement.

RICHARD DE BURY'S prayer that war, the great enemy of the book and therefore of the library, be averted must have risen to the minds of some librarians recently. As we write these lines international relations seem to have reached a boding complexity unrivalled since 1939 and with potentialities for ill as great or even greater. By the time these words appear we hope sanity and a calmer spirit will prevail and that the Christmas we face as librarians may indeed be a happy one. However that may be, the many frustrations all development, including library development, have suffered in the past year, are not likely to be overcome soon. The 35 to 50 millions our interruption for good or ill in the Israel‐Egyptian affair has cost—a relatively small matter financially against our national annual spendings of thousands of millions—are not likely to make for library progress. Yet, paradoxically, our greater advances in modern times have been the outcome of conditions created it would seem by war. The Great World War showed the naked need of the public library service in a way that the previous seventy years of peaceful advocacy had failed to do. Even greater progress came out of the Second World War. What was lost in each of these catastrophes no one has been able to calculate.