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The increased private provision of publicly funded health and social care over the last 75 years has been one of the most contentious topics in UK public policy. In the last decades, health and social care policies in England have consistently promoted the outsourcing of public services to private for‐profit and non‐profit companies with the assumption that private sector involvement will reduce costs and improve service quality and access. However, it is not clear why outsourcing often fails to improve quality of care, and which of the underlying assumptions behind marketising care are not supported by research. This article provides an analysis of key policy and regulatory documents preceding or accompanying outsourcing policies in England (e.g., policy document relating to the 2012 and 2022 Health and Social Care Acts and the 2014 Care Act), and peer‐reviewed research on the impact of outsourcing within the NHS, adult's social care, and children's social care. We find that more regulation and market oversight appear to be associated with less poor outcomes and slower growth of for‐profit provision. However, evidence on the NHS suggests that marketisation does not seem to achieve the intended objectives of outsourcing, even when accompanied with heavy regulation and oversight. Our analysis suggests that there is little evidence to show that the profit motive can be successfully tamed by public commissioners. This article concludes with how policymakers should address, or readdress, the underlying assumptions behind the outsourcing of care services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objectives are as follows. The aim of the present review is to synthesize evidence on the effectiveness of interventions for at‐risk families aimed at preventing the out‐of‐home placement of children or increasing the likelihood that children are reunited with their birth families following temporary care arrangements. The review has two objectives: (1) To assess the effectiveness of interventions for at‐risk families with children aged between 0 and 17 years old on measures of out‐of‐home placement and on secondary outcomes. (2) To identify factors that modify intervention effectiveness (e.g., prior placements, parental risk factors such as substance abuse, mental health issues, age, minority status, child risk factors such as disabilities, age, and gender). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Despite the widely recognized ethical and practical benefits of community engagement in HIV research, epistemic injustice persists within the field. Namely, the knowledge held by communities disproportionately affected by HIV is systematically afforded less credibility than that of more privileged academic researchers. In order to illustrate what this looks like in practice, we synthesized the extent of reporting on community engagement within recent high‐impact HIV intervention research papers. However, we also posit that the HIV research sector has the potential to devise and showcase world‐leading examples of equitable research‐community partnerships and suggest actionable key steps to achieving this goal. Discussion: In the absence of reporting requirements within the publishing process, it is difficult to infer whether and how the community have been consulted in the design, implementation, analysis and/or interpretation of findings. As an illustrative exercise, we offer a rapid synthesis of the extent of reporting on community engagement in HIV research from 2017 to 2019, which highlighted sporadic and very low rates of reporting of community engagement in recent high‐impact HIV intervention studies. Of note is that none of the included studies reported on community engagement through all stages of the research process. There were also discrepancies in how community involvement was reported. We provide three actionable recommendations to enhance reporting on community engagement in HIV research: (1) community‐led organizations, researchers and scientific journals should band together to develop, publish and require adherence to standardized guidelines for reporting on community involvement in HIV research; (2) research funders should (continue to) require details about how relevant communities have been engaged prior to the submission of funding requests; and (3) researchers should take proactive measures to describe their engagement with community organizations in a clear and transparent manner. Conclusions: There is a clear and urgent need for guidelines that facilitate transparent and consistent reporting on community engagement in HIV intervention research. Without standardized reporting requirements and accountability mechanisms within the research sector, the extent of meaningful community engagement cannot be established and may remain a catchphrase rather than reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Systematic reviews cataloguing the barriers to and facilitators of various outcomes are increasingly popular, despite criticisms of this type of review on philosophical, methodological, and practical grounds. The aims of this review are to appraise, analyze, and discuss the reporting and synthesis practices used in recently published barriers and facilitators reviews in health services research. Methods: All English‐language peer‐reviewed systematic reviews that synthesized research on barriers and facilitators in a health services context were eligible for inclusion. We searched 11 databases over a 13‐month period (1 November 2017‐30 November 2018) using an exhaustive list of search terms for "barrier(s)," "facilitator(s)," and "systematic review." Results: One hundred reviews were included. We found a high degree of variation in the synthesis practices used in these reviews, with the majority employing aggregative (rather than interpretive) approaches. The findings echo common critiques of this review type, including concerns about the reduction of complex phenomena to simplified, discrete factors. Although several reviews highlighted the "complexity" of barriers and facilitators, this was usually not analyzed systematically. Analysis of the subsample of reviews that explicitly discussed the barriers and facilitators approach revealed some common issues. These tended to be either conceptual/definitional (eg, ideas about interrelationships and overlap between factors) and methodological/practical (eg, challenges related to aggregating heterogeneous research). Conclusion: Barriers and facilitators reviews should (a) clearly operationally define "barrier" and "facilitator," (b) explicitly describe how factors are extracted and subsequently synthesized, and (c) provide critical reflection on the contextual variability and reliability of identified factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]