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This paper aims to illustrate the complexity of understanding and managing violent behaviour in health care. The authors will show how different perceptions of the reasons for violent behaviour, and linkages between violent behaviour and illness have contributed to the creation of a wicked problem and added significant complexity to the management of violence towards staff within health-care settings. This paper will conclude with a call for strong multi-disciplinary action to address this ongoing issue.

A narrative review was undertaken to explore the ways that violence has been perceived in health care and the ways in which the concept of violence has moved from being seen as a criminal issue to being within the realms of disease. This paper will show the importance of understanding who is perpetrating violence in health care, why and in what settings. It will expound on the idea that considering violence as a consequence of disease necessarily adds a layer of complexity to both individual and organisational responses to violence towards health-care staff.

Understanding the complexity in preventing and managing violence against health-care staff can assist policymakers and managers to develop multi-faceted approaches to violence prevention, including better recognition and understanding of perpetrators of violence.

This paper provides a unique perspective on thinking about violence in health care and the implications of its complexity.

After great Wars, the years that follow are always times of disquiet and uncertainty; the country is shabby and exhausted, but beneath it, there is hope, expectancy, nay! certainty, that better times are coming. Perhaps the golden promise of the fifties and sixties failed to mature, but we entered the seventies with most people confident that the country would turn the corner; it did but unfortunately not the right one! Not inappropriate they have been dubbed the “striking seventies”. The process was not one of recovery but of slow, relentless deterioration. One way of knowing how your country is going is to visit others. At first, prices were cheaper that at home; the £ went farther and was readily acceptabble, but year by year, it seemed that prices were rising, but it was in truth the £ falling in value; no longer so easily changed. Most thinking Continentals had only a sneer for “decadent England”. Kinsmen from overseas wanted to think well of us but simply could not understand what was happening.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

In our last ‘Notes and News’ we made an unfortunate mistake. In writing on the poetry section of the School Library Association's book list Fiction, Verse and Legend we referred to the Bodley Head series of poetry for the young as ‘now regrettably out of print’. Before making this categorical statement we had referred to the Bodley Head's current catalogue ‘with complete back‐list’, and had failed to find any reference to the series, but we had also failed to notice the comparatively insignificant sentence on page ii of the cover: ‘Children's books are listed in a separate catalogue.’

Current issues of Publishers' Weekly are reporting serious shortages of paper, binders board, cloth, and other essential book manufacturing materials. Let us assure you these shortages are very real and quite severe.

THE joint publication, by the Institute and Society of County Treasurers, of Public Library Statistics for 1963–4 provides material of considerable topical interest at this time. The Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964 came into force on 1 April 1965 and only a day or so before this date the Department of Education and Science issued Circular 4–1965, which, in addition to giving a general description of the provisions of the Act, includes an appendix drawing attention to the report of the Ministry of Education published in 1962 (“Standards of Public Library Service in England and Wales”) which, the Circular says, “gives guidance on the factors to be taken into account in considering the adequacy of the service”.

LIBRARY ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE affairs occupy our foreground this month of course. The Llandudno meeting will, we understand, be the last to be held in the spring. Various considerations, weighty enough, have made the early meeting undesirable. Municipal and county library authority members are occupied with elections and university and college librarians are pressed with imminent examinations. September, therefore, will hereafter be conference month, which, for those who so regard conferences, makes them a welcome extension of summer holidays. It also intrudes them into the holiday season and increases their cost and the difficulty of accommodating so large an assembly in halls and hotels.