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Global health donors increasingly embrace international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) as partners, often relying on them to conduct political advocacy in recipient countries, especially in controversial policy domains like reproductive health. Although INGOs are the primary recipients of donor funding, they are expected to work through national affiliates or counterparts to enable 'locally-led' change. Using prospective policy analysis and ethnographic evidence, this paper examines how donor-funded INGOs have influenced the restrictive policy environments for safe abortion and family planning in South Sudan and Malawi. While external actors themselves emphasise the technical nature of their involvement, the paper analyses them as instrumental political actors who strategically broker alliances and resources to shape policy, often working 'behind the scenes' to manage the challenging circumstances they operate under. Consequently, their agency and power are hidden through various practices of effacement or concealment. These practices may be necessary to rationalise the tensions inherent in delivering a global programme with the goal of inducing locally-led change in a highly controversial policy domain, but they also risk inciting suspicion and foreign-national tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses electronic resource management, library schools, and continuing education.

The article presents 2012 news on serials librarians. The North American Serials Interest Group announced the winners of its 2012 annual awards on May 21st. The International Organization for Standardization has published and released the document "Information and Documentation: Digital Object Identifier System". The U.S. Library of Congress announced on May 2, 2012 that it has had partnered with the company Zepheira to help launch the Bibliographic Framework Initiative.

The question of how development agencies should assess their impact has no simple answers and so is often either unasked, or is framed in terms that privilege time-bound and quantitative findings. Describing a council estate neighbourhood project in the UK, the author probes the understandings and perceptions of different stakeholders concerning what they believe has changed over the life of the project, and to what they would attribute those changes. The findings suggest that the impact of development interventions is always contingent upon many factors and can only be properly viewed over time; and that many of the most critical factors in shaping change are intangible and have to do with a wide range of social relations and with human motivation and drive, both individual and collective. The author does not present a ‘blueprint’ for how to conduct impact assessment, but offers some insights into how to frame the questions and interpret the answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the highlights of the "2016 International Federation of Orthopaedic Manipulative Therapists (IFOMPT)" conference held in Glasgow, Scotland in July 2016. Topics covered include the author's contribution to the presentation relating to IFOMPT cervical guidelines, the presentations relating to the conference's theme "Expanding Horizons," and the presentation titled "Expanding our understanding of the inflammatory process and its role in pain and tissue healing."

Presents several symposia related to medical education in Great Britain. Medical scholarships; 2004 Annual Meeting of the International Association of Medical Science Educators; European Association for Communication in Healthcare; Association for Medical Education in Europe; 2nd Asia-Pacific Medical Education Conference.