Publications
Here you'll find the publications we've written or been involved in
Who Works! From fragmentation to coherence through collaborative, constructive communication
The paper seeks to assist public sector leaders take a balanced and impactful approach to transformation programmes which aim to deliver integrated healthcare. The paper highlights the balance of attention paid in these programmes across elements of leadership, strategy, structure and people, and aims to highlight where this balance can sit to encourage more successful and sustainable transformations, with an increased focus on interpersonal and inter-professional engagement and interaction across workforce and service users.
The framework that emerges from this project can contribute to the development of a proactive model to assist transformation leads and decision makers bring a more balanced, thoughtful and impactful approach to integrating health and care services. In particular, the findings point to an overuse of structural approaches to change and transformation, which could include project management methods, for example, that become the product of the initiatives, rather than enablers of leaders’ visions and people’s interpersonal and inter-professional engagement and interactions.
Building on existing research, this paper makes a valuable contribution to the discourse on how to deliver the required health and care integration agenda more accessibly and sustainably, moving away from short-term, quick-fix approaches and considers how to accommodate the role of interpersonal interaction as the vehicle for change.
This paper introduces the concept of our collaborative knowledge networks.
The findings in this paper are transferrable to all public services spaces.
Communities of Practice in the resettlement of children and young people
The purpose of this paper is to set out the role Communities of Practice (CoPs) can play in empowering and enabling practitioners and managers to lead on improvements to the delivery of interventions to children and young people leaving custody.
The paper finds that CoPs are a helpful way to engage, enable and, most importantly, empower, practitioners and managers, thus unlocking the wealth of knowledge and experience that exists across the workforce.
CoPs can be seen as an influence in the development of our own collaborative knowledge networks.
The findings in this paper are transferrable to all public services spaces.
Collaborative working in the resettlement of young people leaving custody
Written alongside Professor John Pitts, this paper seeks to sketch out a blueprint for effective collaborative working in resettlement.
The paper finds that practitioners working on the youth resettlement pathway between custody and community report collaborative practices to be more beneficial both to the young people involved as well as the practitioners themselves, in the conduct of their efforts.
However, experiences of collaboration are mixed, and there are noticeable system and organisational challenges to effective collaboration which need to be addressed to realise the benefits to young people and practitioners this paper identifies.
The findings in this paper are transferrable to all public services spaces.
Towards a contextual response to peer-on-peer abuse
We formed part of the ethnographic fieldwork team for this research, which was delivered by the University of Bedfordshire's International Centre.
The research emphasises the importance of understanding the environments and social contexts in which peer-on-peer abuse occurs. Rather than solely focusing on the individuals involved, the report advocates for a “contextual safeguarding” approach. This approach expands beyond traditional safeguarding methods to address the broader social conditions, like community, school, and peer group influences, which contribute to harmful behaviors among young people.
The report calls for a shift from individual-focused to context-oriented safeguarding, addressing the broader environmental and social factors that influence peer-on-peer abuse. This approach seeks to create safer spaces for young people by promoting systemic change and emphasising collective responsibility across communities, institutions, and families.
Children's Voices
We managed the fieldwork of qualitative interviews for this research programme, which was commissioned by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and delivered by the University of Bedfordshire's International Centre.
HMIC sought to understand the experiences of children and young people across England in contact with the police for safeguarding reasons.
Our findings pointed to a broad range of experiences amongst the young people interviewed, from extremely positive engagements at one end to experiences pointing to professional misconduct and abusive practice from police officers at the other end. The majority of children's experiences lay in between these two extremes.
There were also indications that certain demographics amongst children receive a more negative experience in these circumstances. These include children who go missing, those known to police for offending behaviour, older children, children from BAME backgrounds and those deemed less likely to present as cooperative or compliant.
Of the 'eight core principles' identified as enhancing children's and young people's sense of safety and wellbeing when in contact with the police for safeguarding reasons, this research found that for the majority of respondents these principles were neither fully nor consistently applied.