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This article presents findings from six focus groups with health care practitioners in an Australian hospital during 2010, which sought to elicit their perspectives on the barriers for people to plan their future health care should they become unwell. Such knowledge is invaluable in overcoming the barriers associated with advance care planning and enhancing the uptake of advance directives and the appointment of an enduring power of attorney for people of all ages. A person's rights to self-determination in health care, including decision making about their wishes for future care in the event they lose cognitive capacity, should not be overlooked against the backdrop of increasing pressure on health care systems. Findings suggest that multiple barriers exist, from practitioners' perspectives, which can be divided into three major categories, namely: patient-centred, practitioner-centred and system-centred barriers. Specifically, patient-centred barriers include lack of knowledge, accessibility concerns, the small 'window of opportunity' to discuss advance care planning, emotional reactions and avoidance when considering one's mortality, and demographic influences. At the practitioner level, barriers relate to a lack of knowledge and uncertainty around advance care planning processes. Systemically, legislative barriers (including a lack of a central registry and conflicting state legislation), procedural issues (particularly in relation to assessing cognitive capacity and making decisions ad hoc) and questions about delegation, roles and responsibilities further compound the barriers to advance care planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work clinicians across health care settings are uniquely positioned to disseminate valuable practice experience, thereby contributing to knowledge development within their field of practice and across disciplines. Unfortunately, practitioners tend to shy away from writing and research, and are often reluctant to publicly disseminate their expertise through peer-reviewed journals and conference presentations. To better support health social workers in scholarly endeavors, we developed and implemented The Writing Series Project in southeast Queensland, Australia. This article reports on the development, programmatic challenges and practitioner feedback that offer insight into the benefits and pitfalls that we encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The machinery of income support can have considerable influence in people's lives, creating opportunities for social work but also tensions: access to vulnerable people, but not always on their terms. This paper argues that the challenge to social work is about more than holding on to professional discretion. It considers how social workers can influence service delivery approaches to work more relationally, pursuing a more equal involvement of clients, and recognising the complex interactive context of social and community life. The authors trace the development of such an approach within the Australian Government human services delivery agency Centrelink in Logan, Queensland, and briefly consider a parallel innovation in Newcastle, New South Wales. The authors suggest that grounding a large institutional social service agency in the realities of client and community experiences has mutual benefits, creating a more humanising, cooperative space, and displacing inefficient and sometimes tragic cycles of misunderstanding, confrontation, and disconnection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the broadest level, salutogenesis refers to an emphasis on the origins of health, as opposed to a predilection with the determinants of disease. Kickbusch urges health promotion professionals to adopt a salutogenic orientation; directing research and practice towards the question of 'what creates health?' This salutogenic study focused on the most pleasant part of the health continuum by asking: (i) what is high level wellness and (ii) how do people attain and maintain this way of being? Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 Australian adults who reported a 'high' or 'very high' level of wellness, health and happiness. Participants described what high level wellness meant to them, their wellness journeys, and the things that helped and hindered their wellbeing. This information was coded, compared and crafted into a constructivist grounded theory. Our interpretation of the data suggests that high level wellness is the sense of peace (wellbeing) that comes from knowing, liking and being one's best self. Happy, healthy people seem to attain and maintain this way of being over time, through a series of self-initiated experiential learning cycles. The 'experiential learning theory of high level wellness' links and extends literature on salutogenesis, eudaimonic wellbeing, self-actualization and experiential learning; positioning everyday people as the leaders of their own life-long wellness journeys. It also suggests a new dimension for Antonovsky's salutogenic theory: aspiring, not just adapting. Future research could explore the utility of our approach with a range of populations and professions, progressing towards 'high level wellness for all'., (© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)