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This paper aims to make use of patient complaints as a valuable source of information to enable improvements to the quality of health service delivery.

Thematic analysis was used to analyse records of de‐identified patient complaints made about medical or nursing staff or medical or nursing services between January 2006 and May 2008 in the Mount Isa Health Service District.

Three main themes were identified. These themes were labelled: “communication”, “wait times” and “clinical”. The latter related to specific concerns about the care provided to the patient or their relative. There were 101 complaints analysed. The majority (60 per cent) of complaints related to communication. Wait times for appointments (13 per cent), and clinical (28 per cent) were included in the remainder.

The findings of this research are not generalisable beyond the Health Service District within which the data were collected. However, the principle of systematically using complaints information to improve practice and develop policy can be applied within all health services.

Recommendations to develop policies and improve practice that will address the matters identified in the complaints are made. Changes to complaints data records to assist future research are suggested. The need to facilitate indigenous patients' contribution to suggestions for service delivery improvement is highlighted.

The paper contributes to research that makes use of patient complaints to produce higher standards of patient service delivery.

Having an ageing population is an issue facing many countries, particularly western nations. With governments and service providers focusing on healthy ageing and ageing in place, notions of choice and active participation for older people in selecting services appropriate to remaining in the community are also emphasised. Central to this is the issue of information navigation: knowing what services are available and how to get that information, for older people and those who support them. Based on a series of qualitative studies of service provision and using perspectives from older people, their families and those who provide services for them, this paper argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the process of information navigation as opposed to providing ever more information content.

Enabling optimal care transitions for older people remains a key challenge facing policy‐makers and service providers. This qualitative Australian study aimed to provide a comprehensive picture of the factors/issues surrounding care transitions from the perspective of older people and their carers. It documents how supports and services are searched for and gained during the care transition process and the effect of this process on older people and their families. These findings have implications for service provision and policy relating to both assisting older people to age in place wherever possible and facilitating optimal care transitions when they are required.

This article investigates how medical specialists as professionals and elective cosmetic surgery tourists as consumers relationally negotiate decisions within the cosmetic surgery clinic. Drawing on a Goffmanian approach, this article explores the processual social structures that shape consumer logics in the clinic as a social space and as a type of professional institution.

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in cosmetic surgery clinics in South Korea.

This article identifies two genres of professional strategies (spatial arrangements and dramaturgical performances) that are leveraged by medical specialists to assert control over and persuade consumers to purchase cosmetic surgery.

The valorization of surgery captured in this article suggests that surgical modifications may serve as another vehicle for entrenching class inequality between those able and those unable to afford surgery.

This article offers recommendations for future policymaking in terms of the regulatory oversight of the consumer profiles eligible for surgery and the marketing practices of clinics.

This article offers a micro-level account of how the high-risk good of cosmetic surgery is sold by medical specialists in charismatic and affective bids to enhance their legitimacy, authority and trust.

To encourage radical social theory in a time dominated by a sense of cultural despair and the futility of social transformation to reimagine the possibilities for innovation inherent in such end times. Such a time of ending can also by its nature serve to inspire new beginnings.

To call social theorists as part of their vocation to look for signs of and cultivate such new beginnings.

Such an inquiry must pry and probe beneath the surface of cultural expression and political movements in a time of cultural repression to deeper aspirations for change and renewal, in particular in this case, to the culture of fantasy in literature, cinema and other complex and often veiled forms of expression.

To offer ways for theorists and teachers to begin exploring and encouraging wherever possible the release of the transformative imagination. The social implications involve the reanimation and rekindling of a radical social imagination: by generating dialogue and new ways of thinking it serves as one of the precursors of genuine social movements for change and specifically today for conceptualizing a post-industrial, post-liberal society.

As discussed directly, this essay is original not in asserting the profound role of the political, moral, and utopian imagination in spurring movements for change, but in characterizing this period – one of narrow factualism/literalism, instrumentalism, and pragmatism – as one ripe for such a renewal of the imaginative project.