The growth of professional supervision in social work has been accompanied by complex attempts to theorise key elements of supervisory practice and highlight the need to further examine what constitutes supervisory support in current regulatory environments. Changes in human service organisations resulting from new public management generate a need to theorise broader patterns of support available to human service workers. This article draws on an electronic, mixed-method self-reporting study of advice and support-seeking behaviours of 193 human service professionals in 3 South Australian organisations. The findings indicate the fluidity of current professional supervision practice, with workers seeking professional wisdom, identifying practice direction, and debriefing with a range of colleagues within and outside their organisation. Accordingly, the article confirms that supervisors should no longer be thought of as the sole providers of professional advice and support for human service workers and conceptualises the workers as active agents shaping their own learning.

This article gives attention to furthering understandings about what being successful at university means to social work students, focusing on the perspectives of students who speak English as an additional language (EAL). It departs from approaches in the literature that focus on problematic aspects of teaching and learning. The article is informed by data from a small-scale focus group study of nine students from an undergraduate and a postgraduate social work programme in a South Australian university. Drawing on a methodological approach known as ‘Appreciative Inquiry’, students were asked how they conceptualise, experience and imagine success at university. The study found that students’ understandings of success are inextricably intertwined with their individual, family and community aspirations. These findings are discussed in the light of current dominant assumptions about the notion of success and possible directions for future research and implications for social work education.

This chapter uses a feminist ethics of care lens to examine the policy shifts that are being enacted by governments committed to either reducing or constraining the cost of social welfare through the development of both privatised and personalised service delivery models. For women, as service users, social workers and other human service workers, and informal carers, there are potential gains to be made under the new arrangements. The chapter argues the risks accompanying new market-driven human service delivery models are understated, under-recognised and under-discussed. It suggests that a feminist ethics of care provides a useful framework for a sustained deeper analysis of the new human service delivery system. The political and practical developments in the delivery of human services involved in the movement to consumer-directed care give expression to a particular neo-liberal philosophical position about the nature of social policy and human services. The marketisation of human services has also had significant impact on the re-conceptualisation of service users.

This paper explores the contribution of a physical learning space to student engagement in social work education. Drawing on a constructivist methodology, this paper examines the findings of a survey conducted with students and staff in a social work and human service programme about their experiences of a Social Work Studio learning space. The analysis identified that students and staff who used the Studio reported that students were emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally engaged in the space, which enriched their development as social work and human service practitioners. The researchers concluded that the Social Work Studio is a useful tool for enhancing social work student engagement and increasing their confidence to address the 'real-life' challenges they may face as social work practitioners.

Criminal history checks in Australian social work education are a recent development consistent with international higher education practices and local employment practices. There has been little exploration of the impact other human service educators prior to placing students on field work is a relatively recent development in Australia that reflects the increased use of such checks by human service employers. The use of these checks has the potential to prevent some individuals from undertaking the study program. As such it is an important practice with significant ethical implications for educators. However, despite the debates about the use of criminal record checks in a broad range of contexts (Naylor 2005; Naylor, Paterson et al. 2008) there has been little scrutiny of Australian university practices in this area and indeed the research on which this paper draws demonstrates that there is diversity of practice around Australia with the potential for people with similar criminal histories to have different experiences in different states of Australia. This paper draws on a review of the practices of social work educators in Australian universities involving qualitative research with 16 Australian Schools of Social Work (or equivalent). Utilising the insights of university staff involved in field education, this paper explores the principles that would guide good practice in the management of criminal history checks in social work education.

Maternal mortality remains exceptionally high in Papua New Guinea (PNG) at 733 per 100,000 live births. There has been little, if any, improvement in maternal mortality or maternity services since the 1980s. In 1992-1993 a survey of 550 women in rural coastal areas of Madang Province was undertaken to investigate the prevalence of maternal risk factors and parous women's utilization of and attitudes towards the existing health services. Women were classified as at risk on the basis of previous obstetric complications, parity, stillbirths and neonatal deaths. On this basis 67% of women were classified as being at risk in a future pregnancy. High rates of obstetric complications were reported, with only 42% of women delivering their most recent child in a health facility. There was no statistical difference between those not at risk and those at risk in terms of their use of antenatal care or having been referred for a health centre delivery. The most common reason given for not utilizing the existing health services was lack of access. Most commonly expressed positive perceptions of a health centre delivery were the availability of medical help (59%) and the physical comfort of the health centre (48%). Most common negative views expressed were lack of physical comfort (29%) and the attitudes of staff (11%). Women's opinion on village births was divided. Many (47%) thought that there was nothing good about a village birth and the same percentage cited lack of medical care if problems arose. On the other hand 36% of women thought there was nothing wrong with a village delivery, and 30% cited the care and respect received from relatives as a positive aspect. When asked for suggestions on how services could be improved only a minority of respondents expressed an opinion. Those who did wanted better access, more information on family planning and improved care and respect from staff.

In issues of key scholarly social work journals over the past few years (British Journal of Social Work, Practice and Australian Social Work), articles have addressed the importance of work-based resilience for social work professionals. To date, however, the process of developing resilience has not been well documented in the social work literature. A possible way forward lies in taking account of the practice wisdom and tacit knowledge generated through worker networks both within and beyond the worker's organisational setting. The authors canvass the possibility that worker resilience could be understood as a product of the professional learning process over time, as social work professionals actively create and consolidate norms about effective practice, through testing individual situations against an accumulating evidence base of successful practice.

The Victorian Blood Exposure Surveillance (ViBES) group is a collaboration of 16 Victorian public healthcare services that have developed evidence-based definitions for assessing the risk of blood and body fluid exposures (BBFE) and a practical system for reporting standardised exposure rates. ViBES has been operational since 2004, and in 2008 16 healthcare services contributed data, including 10 metropolitan and 6 from regional Victoria. Data suggest the aggregate rate of total and percutaneous exposures from 2005 to 2008 to be 0.52 and 0.38 exposures per 1000 occupied bed days (OBDs), respectively, with exposures from hepatitis C-infected sources 0.03 exposures per 1000 OBDs. Significant risk exposures decreased from 0.11 to 0.08 exposures per 1000 OBDs from 2005 to 2008, along with operating room percutaneous exposures which decreased from 0.18 to 0.15 during the same period. The reduced rate of exposures during this period may be attributed to the changing healthcare landscape, such as the introduction of safety engineered devices in some facilities. These data provide an objective basis on which to assess and possibly encourage the use of safety cannulae, needle-less IV systems and other interventions to improve healthcare worker safety.

Custodial remand processes, whilst governed in Australian jurisdictions by specific legislation, occur in a complex social and justice context. Legislation across the country contains similar or mirroring provisions, but the implementation of this legislation involves an array of decision-makers, and a range of defendants and their supporters. The decision-making occurs in a judicial context that has developed precedent and settled practice over time, but bail practices vary considerably. This article explores these contextual themes.

Expectations of prison officers' work in policy and in academic literature have become more complex in recent decades, with an increasing emphasis on the need to bring together security roles with human services components of the work. However, staff working within prisons face the daily challenge of working closely with prisoners, who are both subjects of community opprobrium and citizens with complex needs and high levels of volatility. The officer is placed at the centre of this dilemma. This article explores the way these challenges are being resolved in three Australian prisons through the conceptualisation of prison officers' work, and reports research that explored with officers and other staff their understanding of their roles. The article describes the diversity of approaches to conceptualising the work of the prison officer and resolving the competing demands of custodial and human services roles and the influence of the particular prison and the length of time in custodial employment on the resolution of this challenge.

Research carried out in SA and Victoria to look at the purposes and outcomes of custodial remand in terms of justice policy, at a time when questions have been raised about the use of custodial remand - desired policy goals and objectives - implementation systems and indicators of bail policies - purposes for which remand strategies are utilised - effect of competing goals on remand decision-makers - how achievements of goals of custodial remand should be measured.

A transfer of a best practice model was performed between a new institution in the United Kingdom and a leading orthopedic hospital in the United States. The quality concepts transferred to the UK were surgical and hospital throughput, hospital facility design, an Interdisciplinary Preoperative Patient Education Program, infection control standards, and a standardized rehabilitation model. The new hospital was officially opened in February 2004, and the average length of stay for total hip arthroplasty between February and December 2004 was 6.1 +/- 3.0 days, a substantial reduction of 5 days on average. The infection rate was reduced from 1% to 0.16%. This study supports the notion that the implementation of a best practice approach significantly reduces length of stay as well as infection rate.

The continuing increases in the numbers of people in prison because they have been refused bail, together with the differential rates at which people in the various Australian jurisdictions are remanded in custody, raise urgent questions about the use of custodial remand. Traditionally, such questions have been addressed by a focus on judicial decision-making. This article takes a step back from this rather narrow perspective and focuses, rather, on the purposes and outcomes of custodial remand in terms of justice policy. It explores desired policy goals and objectives, implementation systems and indicators of bail policies by a measure of their ‘effectiveness’. Remand in custody and its alternative, bail, are conceptualised in this paper as strategies. The article explores the purposes for which remand strategies are utilised, the effect of competing goals on remand decision-makers, and how achievements of the goals of custodial remand (and its alternatives) could be better measured.

This qualitative study investigated surgical nurses' perceptions of patient-controlled analgesia as a strategy for managing acute pain in a tertiary care hospital. Patient-controlled analgesia is commonly used and nurses play an essential role in caring for patients prescribed it. The study was divided into two parts. First, audiotaped semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 nurses. The interviews were followed by a postal questionnaire to 336 nurses with 171 returned. Thematic analysis was the chosen methodology. The audiotaped transcripts and questionnaires surfaced five themes, with the dominant one being 'I think PCA is great, but . . .'. The paper outlines and explores these themes and addresses the implications arising from the research for both clinical practice and education.

Restorative justice as popularly conceived is intertwined with community. Building trust within communities, restoring damaged social and interpersonal relations, widening the ways in which conflict and violence are understood and responded to are all elements of restorative justice. There are parallels here with the activities of community-development workers working in conflicted neighbourhood level communities. Might some of the practices within a typical restorative justice initiative be useful to community development? We highlight the potential benefits of dialogical processes and structured healing relationships that are inherent in restorative justice work. We argue that some longstanding understandings within community development could usefully extend the ways in which restorative justice is typically enacted.