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Family group conferences (FGCs) in child welfare share decision-making with family members by bringing the immediate and wider family together to make a plan to meet a child's needs. This paper reports survey findings on FGC provision in the UK in 2022 and explores whether in England the presence of an FGC service and the rate of FGC provision is associated with the rate of children in care, entering care, in kinship foster care and leaving care. Seventy-nine per cent (n  = 167) of local authorities in the UK provided FGCs to families, and 14 per cent (n  = 29) did not. Services that were more established offered a more diverse range of FGCs. The introduction of FGCs in English local authorities was associated with a higher rate of children in care, but also higher rates of kinship foster care, a key goal of FGCs where it is not possible for children to stay with their parents. Higher rates of FGCs were associated with more children leaving care, possibly due to reunification with birth families. To understand in more detail, the circumstances of children in and leaving care in local authorities with FGCs, individual data linkage studies are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adults accessing community mental health services are required to have a care plan, developed in collaboration with the person accessing the service. The variation in care plan templates in use in England and Wales, and their impact on care planning, is unknown. This study evaluates the community mental health care plan templates in use across England and Wales. Data were obtained from a Freedom of Information request to 50 NHS Mental Health Trusts. An evaluation tool was designed and used to extract data. Data were rated red, amber, or green against clinical and design standards. Forty-seven care plan templates were obtained. The clinical aspect of the care plan template had 60% adherence to the national standards, and the design aspects had 87% adherence. A 'high/low' typology is proposed against the design/clinical standards. The study identifies priority areas for improvement in the care plan templates as space to record the actions that service users and carers will take to contribute to their care plan, space to record the name and contact details for their care coordinator or lead professional, plus others involved in the person's care. This study was not registered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The adverse impact of austerity on the available capacity of public bodies to give priority to engagement of older people means self-determination and older people representing the best interests of older people more generally – needs a fresh impetus if the voice of older people is to be heard and not marginalised. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach The paper describes how a new direction for Cymru Older People’s Alliance was shaped, the engagement directly with older people that informed changes and key transitions negotiated to become a charity and form a democratically elected membership, with stronger structures and improved means to ensuring the “voice” of older people is heard.Findings Co-production, increased citizen engagement and promoting well-being are important new concepts in Welsh legislation but it is only through growing the infrastructure that enables older people to represent their own interests, that these new requirements will produce tangible results and progress can be made.Originality/value If we are to challenge ageism and recognise that older people need to be empowered and enabled to make their own decisions, then older people’s organisations need to change and adapt to the prevailing financial climate. This is not an easy pathway but it can be achieved through good planning, strong governance and effective engagement, listening carefully to older people’s views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the neo-institutional perspective in conceptualizing the public- private partnership in water provision in England and Wales. It questions the simplistic assumptions that effective water governance lies in getting institutions, incentives, and authority right. Drawing upon Mary Douglas's social embeddedness of institutions, this paper demonstrates that use of water is both individually-pursued and socially-shaped. This paper calls for a reorganization of the institutional arrangements to tackle power asymmetries between the regulators, water companies, and the public. It suggests that the design of the regulatory structures needs to cohere with the cultural meaning of water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Recent research on social capital has explored trends in membership in voluntary organizations. However, there is currently little robust evidence on such trends in the UK since the 1970s, nor is there any analysis of whether participation bridges social divisions or accentuates them. This paper explores trends in participation in England and Wales since 1972 using data from the Social Mobility Inquiry of 1972 and the British Household Panel Survey of 1992 and 1999. We are concerned with social exclusion mechanisms in social capital generation in Britain over the three decades. Using binomial and multinomial models to 'unpack' the effects of socio-cultural factors on civic participation and on different types of associational membership, we test the thesis of across-the-board decline in social capital by Putnam (2000) and that of rising levels of middle-class social capital versus consistent low levels of working-class social capital by Hall (1999). The results show significant socio-cultural-gender differences, a relative stability of middle-class participation, and a rapid decline in the working-class access to social capital. We challenge the established accounts of both theses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the establishment of a national legislature in Wales in 1999 the third sector has entered into a pioneering cross-sectoral partnership with the Welsh government. This paper presents the results of a research project that has studied the new structures of devolved governance through the expectations and participation of voluntary organizations representing three marginalized or “minority” groupings: women, disabled people, and those from an ethnic minority background. The findings reveal that despite varying levels of expectation expressed by “minority” voluntary groups, active engagement of minority groups in policy making has been a feature of the Assembly's first months. Nevertheless, formidable challenges face both sectoral “partners” in the new system of governance, not least in creating organizational structures that facilitate partnership working in the devolved polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent writing on the professions has given little consideration to the state's potential for threatening a professional formation. This paper argues that the reorganization of probation officer training in England and Wales is an instance of state-led de-professionalization. The process of problematizing the issue and the steps taken to try and mobilize public endorsement for radical policy change are traced, as are the counter-moves of groups attempting to maintain the existing training arrangements. This illuminates two aspects of contemporary public debate in the UK. First, it demonstrates the impact of the requirement that public sector organizations and occupations show ‘enterprise’ by successful self-promotion. Second, the episode is located within Habermas's concept of the public sphere, in which participation itself - let alone any possibility of achieving the desired outcome - now appears to depend upon relative resources and on attracting the attention of influential news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: All health care systems face the need to find the resources to meet new demands such as a new, cost-increasing health technology. In England and Wales, when a health technology is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the National Health Service (NHS) is mandated to provide the funding to accommodate it within three months of publication of the recommendation. Identifying what, in practice, is foregone when new cost-increasing technologies are introduced is important for understanding the effects of health technology assessment (HTA) decisions on the NHS or any other health care system. Our objective was to investigate how in practice local NHS commissioners in Wales accommodated financial "shocks" arising from technology appraisals (TAs) issued by NICE and from other cost pressures.Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with Finance Directors and Medical Directors from all seven Local Health Boards (LHBs) in NHS Wales. These interviews covered prioritisation processes, as well as methods of financing NICE TAs and other financial shocks at each LHB. We then undertook a systematic identification of themes and topics from the information recorded. The study relates to the period October 2010 to March 2013.Results: The financial impact of NICE TAs is generally anticipated and planned for in advance and the majority of LHBs have contingency funds available to cope with these and other financial shocks within-period. Efficiency savings (defined as reductions in costs with no assumed reductions in quality) were a source of funds for cost pressures of all kinds. Service displacements were not linkable to particular NICE TAs and there appears to be a general lack of explicit prioritisation activities. The Welsh Government has, on occasion, explicitly or implicitly acted as the funder of last resort.Conclusions: Services may be displaced as part of a response to the cumulative impact of all types of cost pressures, including cost-increasing health technologies recommended by NICE, but such displacements were not direct responses to the publication of individual NICE TAs. The additional cost pressure represented by a new NICE TA is likely to be accommodated at least partly by greater efficiency and increased expenditure rather than displacement of services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the Mental Health Act Commission for England and Wales was closed down and its functions subsumed in separate organisations in the two countries. Its final biennial report, issued that year, focused on coercion and consent. This article uses some aspects of the report to discuss the implications of lawful psychiatric coercion being predicted by social group membership (correlated with race, age and gender). The work of the Commission furnished useful information in this regard, but its framework for data collection could not, and so did not, illuminate a more established picture of the class gradient in mental health problems. With the latter literature in mind, material adversity may explain the racial patterning of psychiatric populations coercively detained. However, normative aspects of risk-taking in the community and in hospital may better predict the findings on age and gender. The article concludes by querying the ameliorative impact of government appointed ‘visitorial’ bodies. Legalism-plus-safeguards is a questionable basis for meaningfully bringing discriminatory powers to book, or for reversing the differential impact of pathogenic social forces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2002, the Welsh Assembly Government published its Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Housing Action Plan for Wales. This required social landlords in Wales to develop policies, practices and procedures which took into account the needs of BME people. This plan also stated that they should promote race equality within the procurement process by increasing their use of BME contractors and consultants and by ensuring that the contractors and consultants they engaged were operating within a race equality framework. The aim of this research was to investigate the factors affecting race equality and procurement in the social housing sector in Wales. This involved collecting data from social landlords, main contractors and consultants and BME contractors and consultants. This research discusses the data collected from 39 social landlords in Wales (12 of the 22 local authorities and 27 of the 30 major housing associations). Data were collected relating to their procurement practices and procedures. The research found that few social landlords in Wales were actively addressing the issue of race equality within the procurement process and that much is needed to be done by social landlords in Wales to ensure race equality throughout the procurement process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the accreditation scheme for health library services in England and Wales. It was determined that the use of an accreditation scheme for health library services can be an effective method to develop positive changes that improve access to the knowledge domain of health care for health care personnel. Organizations which are in charge in the library services for the National Health Service (NHS) should also adopt or maintain its use. However, in the survey on the assessment accreditation of NHS library services, it showed at least 15 percent positive perceptions for the accreditation.

The impact of planning on organizational performance in the public sector has been widely debated but has never previously been tested empirically. We develop a statistical model of planning effects that contains five explanatory variables: the extent of organizational analysis, the extent of environmental scanning, the number of precise performance targets, the existence of formal action plans for service improvement and the attitudes of staff involved in the planning process. This model is applied to data obtained from seventy services in Welsh local government. The statistical evidence shows that organizational performance is positively related to favourable attitudes towards planning processes, but negatively related to the number of targets that are set. On balance, the results are consistent with a small positive effect of planning on the performance of public organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sociologically analyzes the nature of the church and explores the way the empirical material collected may contribute to the sociological enterprise. Churches are to be viewed as institutionalised associational groups with bureaucratic forms of administration. Within a church are to be found all four types of legitimation of its social order, the dominant form being value-rational. As institutions they are sui generis. They can be defined in terms of general analytic categories, but in their combination of them they constitute a unique class of sociological phenomena. They cannot be assimilated to the type organisation, although they exhibit different forms of organisation. However, there are moments in their history when they have to devote themselves to coping with conditions which whether material, social or ideal force them to behave pragmatically and evaluate their activities in a Zweck-rational way. It is the very feature of the Church in Wales taken together with the existence of central wealth which evidently give rise to a paradox. In organisational terms barely viable service centres struggle to remain in existence and they are forced to abandon the goal of service extension in order to preserve that of service provision.

The British Housing Studies Association Conference held in Cardiff in September 2001 was the first housing conference devoted to housing and theory. Because of this we have commissioned an extended conference report that includes reports from as many of the workshops as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the German History Society Regional Conference at the University of Wales Swansea on April 2001. Theme and purpose of the event; Organization of sessions; Request for articles on conference theme; Contact numbers.

The article reports that the students and postdoctoral researcher had dominated the ranks of attendees at the 1996 United Kingdom Oceanography conference held at the University of Wales in Bangor, Wales on September 2-6, 1996. The conference is sponsored by the Challenger Society of Marine Science, which is headquartered at the Southampton Oceanography Centre. In addition, the conference's organizing committee included participants from other European countries. Because of the large number of attendees and the varied distribution of papers presented, this conference indicated a healthy ocean science research community in the United Kingdom.

Focuses on problems related to registration of patients at Brynteg Dental Practice, an organization in Carmarthen, Wales as of October 25, 2003. Criticism of the organization for limiting registration of number of patients to 300; Suggestion of the author to the government of Wales on how to solve the problem; Information on number of patients that can be registered under one dentist.

The article reports on the highlights of the joint summer meeting of the British Ecological Society with the British Phycological Society that was held in Aberystwyth, Wales on July 19-24, 1954. Professor Lily Newton welcomed the members of the organizations on behalf of the principal and warden of the hall. Financial and administrative arrangements were made by Dr. Gwendolen Rees and E. H. Chater. Two expeditions, mainly consisting of botanists, have been made on July 20, 1954.

The authors provide information on the Greening of Industry Network (GIN) conference in 2006 in Cardiff, Wales. They state that the issues about sustainability relative to the business itself, to the environment and society is the focus of the conference's discussion. They denote that the conference highlighted the inspiring examples of several individuals and organizations trying to move ahead. Moreover, they emphasize that the conference made a significant contribution in answering questions relative to sustainability.

Comments on topics related to the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (EPOP) specialist group of the Political Studies Association (PSA) of Great Britain. Role played by EPOP in the success of the journal "British Elections & Parties Review"; Highlights of the 2003 conference of EPOP in Cardiff, Wales.