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<p>Continued professional development (CPD) has been at the centre of capacity building in most successful organisations in western countries over the past few decades. Specialised professions in fields such as Accounting, Finance and ICT, to name but a few, are continuously evolving, which is necessitating certain standards to be followed through registration and certification by a designated authority (e.g. ACCA). Whilst most developed countries such as the UK and the US have well established frameworks for CPD for these professions, several developing nations, including Qatar (the chosen context for this article) are only just beginning to adopt these frameworks into their local contexts. However, the unique socio-cultural settings in such countries require these frameworks to be appropriately modified before they are adopted within the respective national context. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of CPD in Qatar through comparing the UK as a benchmark and drawing corresponding and contrasting observations to formulate a roadmap towards developing a high level framework.</p>

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Publications continue to affirm that there are no agreed definitions or conceptual frameworks for co-production and co-creation in relation to public services. Consequently, across and within academic and grey literature lie many examples of confusion and contradictions. These hinder insightful discussion and explanatory research. This paper argues that underlying this muddle is a failure to be clear about the nature and structure of public services. The commonly used “service to customers” model from commerce is a misleading oversimplification. To re-frame the discussions on co-creation and co-production, a model is developed of a generic multi-actor, multi-instrument system that helps to identify the real issues associated with governmental and non-governmental actors combining to achieve a social outcome. The system can be assessed in terms of relationships (e.g. degrees of openness and collaboration) and the role of technology (e-government). The essential role of the government is determined to be policy and system design.

This article describes the results of strategies to elicit views of practicing nurses by the Texas Board of Nursing regarding competencies expected of new graduate licensed vocational nursing/LPN, associate degree/diploma, and baccalaureate nurses. The implications of these perceptions regarding the competencies expected of new graduates in Texas are considered, with questions posed for future exploration.

Expert Systems and Artificial Intelligence in Decision Support Systems H. G. Sol, C. A. T. Takkenberg & P. F. de Vries Robbé (Eds), 1987 Dordrecht, D. Reidel vii+330 pp., £47.25 ISBN 90 277 2437 7

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