'Mind-Boggling Medical History' is a medical history card game created by Dr Sarah Chaney, Dr Sally Frampton and Sarah Punshon. The game is a fun and interactive way of introducing non-academic audiences to ideas from historical and contemporary science and medicine. The card game will be available both in hard copy and as an online resource. Players are challenged to sort medical facts and theories into three categories: Current Model, Disproved and Fictional and can play against one another as both individuals and teams. Simple and entertaining, it invites questions as to the value and purpose of history and introduces participants to new scholarship from the Constructing Scientific Communities (Conscicom) project. This project builds upon a game that has been used as an occasional museum event to create a new educational resource to teach critical thinking and research skills to museum visitors, tertiary health care students and school students. It will also be made accessible to the general public. Accompanying guidance will help teachers and educators use the physical game in classroom sessions, while interested adults and school audiences will use the online game at home and school. The expanded resource will be developed with the help of specialists including museum practitioners and health care educators, and students and teachers will be involved in the testing. The card game will be distributed to nursing lecturers, librarians and museum practitioners. The online resource will be freely available via the high profile citizen science portal Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org) who are already project partners on Conscicom. The game, and feedback from it, will also help inform learning activities for the Science Museum's new medical galleries, due for completion in 2019. By using the game to experiment with and evaluate public perceptions of medicine, Mind-Boggling Medical History focuses on an important objective of Conscicom: to enhance understanding of public engagement with science since the late Victorian era and to break down divisions between professional science and the public. Furthermore, it promises to be an innovative way of carrying out interdisciplinary work, showing how historical facts and theories can be used to prompt questions about current day understandings of medicine, the need for health practitioners to stay up to date in their field, and the impact changes in medical knowledge can have on patient care.

Between 2022-23 the UK saw a wave of strike action unprecedented since the 1980s and included action by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) - a union that has not taken action in England before. Existing studies of strikes generally distinguish between proximate and underlying causes, but agree that they are multi-causal social phenomena that are not reducible to a single factor. Strikes remain an important subject for study because they are often the 'tip of the iceberg', reflecting underlying tensions and grievances in the workplace, organisation and wider sector. Further, their occurrence may reflect the efficiency (or otherwise) of the machinery for the settlement of grievances at national or organisational level. While it is clear that pay and inflation were the immediate drivers for recent public and private sector industrial action, the narratives of those on strike in the public services pointed to a wider context reflecting the reduced capacity of public services and changes in work and the context of work that pre-dated, but were intensified by COVID-19. This research aims to investigate the 2022-23 public service strikes in three public services, health, education and rail, represented by four trade unions and focussing on teachers, nurses, paramedics, and rail workers. It will utilise first-hand participant accounts that explore the processes, dynamics, meanings and significance of strikes from the bottom-up, but located within their wider institutional, political, economic and social contexts. With a perceived crisis in many areas of the public services marked by chronic staff shortages, the research explores the significance of potential disruptions to professional identity and status related to the erosion of public service service delivery that may affect the relationship between staff and service users as well as organisational commitment. While in the past unions that highlight professional identity have been assumed to be less likely to organise industrial action, the complex dynamics between professionalism and industrial action deserves further attention against the backdrop of the recent resurgence of labour and strikes in UK public services. The research will look at the extent to which these issues were motivators for industrial action across occupations and sectors of the public services, in addition to pay and inflation. Women now comprise a majority of UK trade union members, largely a reflection of the enduring strength of public service trade unionism. This research additionally considers the diversity of participants in recent industrial action in terms of race, gender and age and how these different social identities were or were not reflected or articulated in industrial action. The research will take an intersectional lens to industrial conflict and will thus advance the theorisation of intersectionality within the context of work and employment. The research will have significant social and economic impact with improved understanding of the key issues for public service workers that underpin distal and proximal causes of strikes that may help to reduce future conflict and the negative economic and social impacts of industrial action, including on productivity. It will inform public sector pay setting and the work of pay review bodies by illuminating the wider factors that may need to be addressed beyond pay to allay industrial conflict. Findings will have implications for professional bodies such as the CIPD, refocusing human resources and practices on conflict resolution and informing HR practitioners and unions in their negotiations.

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the face of healthcare delivery and has placed ever changing demands on nursing care. This qualitative study will use audio, visual diaries or written diaries kept over four weeks of a clinical placement and telephone or on-line interviews at the end of the placement, to gather data from second and third year student nurses in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Student nurses will describe their experiences of education both before and during the pandemic (including between the first and second waves) and their experience of on-line learning, commenting on what went well and what could have been done better. They will also identify any transferable skills they acquired and how these may be used in nursing to provide optimal care throughout the different phases of the pandemic and beyond.The study will investigate the psychological wellbeing of student nurses and the extent to which their experience within the Covid pandemic influences their identities as nurses and their intentions to pursue a career in nursing.