Keith Hurst – författare

Even though primary and community care managers face the same challenges as their hospital counterparts they’ve never had an equivalent range of methods for evaluating workforce size and mix. So this book aims to set the record straight by explaining community demand and supply side workforce planning and development. Eight chapters set out the main variables, from dependency and workload, activity and performance, staff education, recruitment and retention, before the most recent data are synthesised into a set of software-supported algorithms that managers can easily adopt.

The book and software enable readers to not only compare their organisations with those in the same socio-economic group but also against ‘best-practice’ staffing and performance. Both help managers determine if their stock of workers is equitable, efficient and effective. Finally, a large annotated bibliography helps users locate relevant publications, and readers should look out for workshops in 2006 designed take them through the book’s methods.

First published in 1988, Young Readers Responding to Poems adopts a teacher-researcher approach to the processes of responding to poems. It shows experienced teachers exploring how their students, aged fourteen and above, read and respond to poetry, sets their innovative practices against the background of traditional theory in poetry teaching, and theorises these practices so as to generate new concepts to help teachers understand how readers and poems interact. Governed by the feeling that literature must be ‘rescued’ from the teacher’s explanation and given back to readers, the book will be of great practical value to teachers of English. It suggests classroom practices that will motivate children to read poetry with enthusiasm based on the knowledge that their individual responses are not only valid but valued as the main subject-matter of poetry lessons.Beginning with a critical appraisal of the main theorists in the field from I.A. Richards to Louise Rosenblatt, Michael Benton outlines the main conceptual and methodological problems in exploring responses to poetry. The work of three teacher-researchers – John Teasey, Ray Bell and Keith Hurst – is recorded. It maps in detail pupils' evocations of poems, monitors their responses as individuals and in groups, and offers ways of conceptualising the idiosyncratic character of reading, the stages of response, and the nature of group talk about poetry. In a final chapter, Michael Benton draws together what can be concluded from these three enquiries about the elements of response to poetry and offers a response-centred methodology.

Psychiatric Nursing Revisited is a detailed and empirical study of acute mental health nursing and patient activity that joins a family of similar successful studies, such as Altschul (1972); Towell (1975); Cormack (1976, 1983); Faulkner et al (1994) and Hurst (1993, 1995). The far-ranging recommendations made by the authors, based on their findings, make this book an essential resource for all those who nurse, manage or teach in the field of psychiatric nursing.

Even though primary and community care managers face the same challenges as their hospital counterparts they’ve never had an equivalent range of methods for evaluating workforce size and mix. So this book aims to set the record straight by explaining community demand and supply side workforce planning and development. Eight chapters set out the main variables, from dependency and workload, activity and performance, staff education, recruitment and retention, before the most recent data are synthesised into a set of software-supported algorithms that managers can easily adopt. The book and software enable readers to not only compare their organisations with those in the same socio-economic group but also against ‘best-practice’ staffing and performance. Both help managers determine if their stock of workers is equitable, efficient and effective. Finally, a large annotated bibliography helps users locate relevant publications, and readers should look out for workshops in 2006 designed take them through the book’s methods.