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Intensive support teams (ISTs) are often poorly understood, despite reports of their effectiveness in managing behaviour that challenges for individuals with an intellectual disability. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of ISTs through evaluating one IST’s process and their use of positive behaviour support (PBS) as an intervention.

Participants were obtained from the ISTs discharge database, and pre- and post-intervention data from these participants was used for analysis.

Three-paired sample t-tests found that there were significant differences between pre- and post-scores on the behaviour problem inventory, Health of the Nation Outcomes Scale for people with Learning Disabilities and periodic service reviews, which measure quality of targeted, individualised support. This indicates that challenging behaviour frequency and severity were lower post-intervention, quality of life improved post-intervention and staff teams implemented recommended strategies more consistently by the end of the intervention.

This service evaluation captured data over seven-year period, which helps to contribute to the understanding of the effectiveness of ISTs and the PBS framework.

Most individuals regularly encounter fire, but certain uses are legally disallowed. Horsley (2020, 2021; in press) proposed the continuum of fire use theory (CoFUT), which posits that the legitimacy of fire use exists on a spectrum. This study aims to investigate the CoFUT and to elucidate the process of conceptualising legitimacy in a sample of legitimate fire users.

A sample of 16 legitimate fire users underwent semi-structured interviews regarding their own experiences with fire, the factors considered when determining the legitimacy of fire use and the relationships between those factors. The data extracted was subjected to conceptual analysis.

Analysis indicated that the legitimacy of fire use is best conceptualised along a continuum. Placement on the continuum required consideration of seven defining attributes: function; location; scale; materials used; characteristics of the actor(s); potential and actual consequences, and social acceptance. These attributes were shown to have interactive semantic relationships with one another.

A continuum approach to understanding fire use is a novel conceptualisation. Exposing the nuances that exist along the continuum could inform early intervention strategies aimed at fostering healthy relationships between young people and fire. Furthermore, practitioners working with arsonists would benefit from adopting a continuum perspective that allows for consideration of offenders’ individualised trajectory “up and down” the continuum of fire use.

Findings offer support for the CoFUT (2020; 2021; in press) and provide insight into how the legitimacy of fire use is conceptualised in legitimate fire users.

The foreword to Women's Work in Public Relations discusses the multitude of ways that women experience public relations (PR) work. Each women's experience depends on, for instance, location, culture, the presence (or otherwise) of a union or professional association, the support of colleagues, the practitioner's domestic circumstances and more. There is not just one female experience of PR.

This foreword reviews the chapters in Women's Work in Public Relations and points to the parallels, contradictions, and struggles faced by women working in the little-understood occupation of PR where the everyday work of women is largely invisible. It explains how women working in PR carry out tasks which can at once be necessary, unnecessary, the whim of a client or management, performative, or exploitative – such is the varied and unstructured occupation of PR.

Women face barriers and discrimination at work but past research has not always explained the form that this takes. The foreword notes that much discrimination takes place in plain sight (for instance in terms of erratically applied flexible working policies, unpredictable workloads, or language in professional documents that accepts inequality) and observes that unless we recognise discrimination it's difficult to vocalise opposition to it.

The foreword's discussion of methodology shows that there is no one way to study women working in PR and this book represents a small but rich range of largely qualitative research methodology. It demonstrates that, just as there are many experiences of women in PR, there are also many ways to research them.

Current top-down literacy reform mandates have reenergized attention to professional development (PD) outcomes. Still, questions remain about why English teachers struggle to apply their learning. Refocusing attention on understanding the complex yet critical relationship between professional development (PD) facilitators and teachers offers one explanation.

Using a telling case from an interactional ethnography, this paper illustrates how through their language-in-use teachers and facilitators can productively resolve conflicts that, if left unaddressed, can prevent teachers from acting on their professional learning.

A set of discursive moves – flagging, naming, soliciting and processing – provide a toolkit for surfacing and successfully resolving conflict in PD interactions.

These moves offer a way of prioritizing the importance of teacher–facilitator relationships in future research aimed at addressing the longstanding conundrum of how best to support English teachers’ ongoing professional learning.

Teaching facilitators and teachers how to collaboratively address inevitable conflicts offers a needed intervention in supporting both teacher and facilitator learning.

Previous research has affirmed that facilitators, like teachers, need support for navigating the complexity of professional learning interactions. This paper offers a language for uncovering why teacher–facilitator interactions can be so challenging for teachers and facilitators as well as ways of responding productively in-the-moment. It contributes to a more capacious understanding of how these relationships shape diverse English teacher learning.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss outcomes of a service redesign, involving an Intensive Support Team (IST) for adults with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour, working in conjunction with a Community Learning Disability Service (CLDS).

Two IST staff were physically based as “Inreach workers” within a CLDS for six months. Inreach workers provided support with existing resources and consultation for specific clients presenting with challenging behaviour. CLDS staff confidence, understanding and implementation of existing challenging behaviour resources was evaluated before and after service redesign. An online questionnaire was used to gather further data relating to experiences of the Inreach project.

CLDS staff confidence, understanding and implementation of existing challenging behaviour resources increased over the six-month inreach period. Questionnaire results indicated CLDS staff found Inreach support to be beneficial, having a perceived positive impact for clients, and providing clarity on the skills and resources provided by the IST.

The long-term effects of this pilot have yet to be established. Consideration is given to how demand characteristics may have influenced CLDS responses.

Careful consideration should be given in terms of how ISTs interface with CLDSs. ISTs may consider being based physically within CLDSs, to provide more readily accessible support.

Providing CLDS staff with more accessible support from ISTs may increase the effective implementation of available resources for adults with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.

EVERY librarian in his inmost heart dislikes newspapers. He regards them as bad literature; attractors of undesirable readers; a drain upon the limited resources of the library; and a target against which the detractors of public libraries are constantly battering. From the standpoint of the librarian, newspapers are the most expensive and least productive articles stocked by a library, and their lavish provision is, perhaps, the most costly method of purchasing waste‐paper ever devised. Pressure of circumstances and local conditions combine, however, to muzzle the average librarian, and the consequence is that a perfectly honest and outspoken discussion of the newspaper question is very rarely seen. In these circumstances, an attempt to marshal the arguments for and against the newspaper, together with some account of a successful practical experiment at limitation, may prove interesting to readers of this magazine.

SEPTEMBER, as always, sees us contemplating our activities for the winter months. Exigencies of publishing compel us to write these notes a short time before that month begins, and our contemplation of things this year is coloured by the now rather remote possibility that September may bring the invasion that has been the shadow ahead for a year or more. To plan in a twilight time, as it were, is more than ordinarily difficult, and yet it is a commonsense and correct course to go on, not as if nothing could happen, but to the full extent of our means as they exist. Otherwise general paralysis would occur every time our statesmen warned us of possible attacks. There is no fear of such premature paralysis, however, as our people only want to be up and doing “with a heart for any date.”

This literature scoping review aims to investigate if, how and why eating behaviours change after a crisis event such as a natural disaster, financial crisis or pandemic in high-income countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting “lockdowns” and social distancing measures have changed access to food, the types of food consumed and usual eating behaviours. Early research on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is compared with existing literature on other high-impact crises in high-income countries around the world, such as Hurricane Katrina and the Global Financial Crisis. A search of four electronic databases in August 2020 of literature from 2000 to 2020 yielded 50 relevant publications that were included in the qualitative thematic analysis.

The analysis found that crisis events made accessing food more difficult and led to increased food insecurity. Home cooking, sharing food and eating together (within households during the pandemic) all increased during and after a crisis. Resources often reduced and needed to be pooled. Crises had a multi-directional impact on dietary patterns, and the motivators for dietary pattern change differ between populations and crises.

In conclusion, eating behaviours impacted by crises because of the disruption of food systems, increased food insecurity and changes in daily routines. Community networks were a strong protective factor against adverse outcomes from food insecurity.

The aim of this study is twofold: (1) to gain insight into the different perspectives on the relationship between patient and person centeredness and (2) to learn more about the differences between non-academic and academic stakeholders in the healthcare system.

This mixed-methods study includes a scoping review on person and patient centeredness and in-depth interviews with patients, caregivers, staff and management of healthcare organizations. The data were analyzed by following the six phases of Braun and Clarke.

The analysis of the data showed four different perspectives on patient versus person centeredness: (1) they are synonyms; (2) one term is favorite; (3) they should be in balance; and (4) person centeredness is the surplus on top of patient centeredness.

There are different perspectives on patient versus person centeredness. Perspectives differ between people and can change over time. Some people feel like a patient all the time, other people feel like a person all the time, and some feel like a patient at one point in time and as a person at another point in time.

These different perspectives can have important implications for the so-called moments of truth. In their role as patients, people value functional encounters and in their identity as people they value meaningful encounters with caregivers.

By unraveling these different perspectives, novel insights were found in the different perspectives people can take.

The study aims to explore the theoretical bases justifying the use of performance-based financing (PBF) in the health sector in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

The authors conducted a scoping review of the literature on PBF so as to identify the theories utilized to underpin it and analyzed its theoretical justifications.

Sixty-four studies met the inclusion criteria. Economic theories were predominant, with the principal-agent theory being the most commonly-used theory, explicitly referred to by two-thirds of included studies. Psychological theories were also common, with a wide array of motivation theories. Other disciplines in the form of management or organizational science, political and social science and systems approaches also contributed. However, some of the theories referred to contradicted each other. Many of the studies included only casually alluded to one or more theories, and very few used these theories to justify or support PBF. No theory emerged as a dominant, consistent and credible justification of PBF, perhaps except for the principal-agent theory, which was often inappropriately applied in the included studies, and when it included additional assumptions reflecting the contexts of the health sector in LMICs, might actually warn against adopting PBF.

Overall, this review has not been able to identify a comprehensive, credible, consistent, theoretical justification for using PBF rather than alternative approaches to health system reforms and healthcare providers' motivation in LMICs.

The theoretical justifications of PBF in the health sector in LMICs are under-documented. This review is the first of this kind and should encourage further debate and theoretical exploration of the justifications of PBF.