Access to the women's Offender Personality Disorder Pathway-making criteria more gender-responsive.

A manager is responsible for planning, organising, leading and controlling resources to achieve organisational goals effectively (Lloyd & Aho :7). Within the healthcare setting, managers ensure that operations run smoothly while maintaining quality, efficiency and staff well-being. Radiology departments offer diagnostic and therapeutic services that involve complex technologies and multidisciplinary teamwork and are integral to patient care (Chau :S10). In diagnostic radiography, the manager oversees imaging services, staff coordination, workflow management and adherence to safety and ethical standards (McFadden et al. :S73). In the study context, diagnostic radiography middle managers (DRMMs) are employees of a radiology practice who supervise frontline radiography staff members and are responsible for the general management of the imaging branch. This position is also referred to or known as a Head of Department (HOD). At the start of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in March 2020, DRMMs had to ensure the continuous delivery of essential radiological examinations and procedures. As the coronavirus affected the lungs of infected individuals, radiographic chest X-rays (CXR) and computed tomography (CT) examinations played a crucial role in the diagnosis of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (Akudjedu et al. :8; Aljondi et al. :52; Hundah, Sibiya & Khoza :5; Jorge & Fridell :378). As described by Wu et al. (:219), CXR and CT examinations usually revealed bilateral pneumonia (in 75% – 98% of cases) with multiple mottling and ground-glass opacity. Akyurt (:1) clarified that the requests for CXR and CT examinations as diagnostic imaging tools increased because these imaging examinations became the preferred imaging in diagnosing COVID-19 pneumonia. As the pandemic progressed, the various branches of the research site experienced an increase in requests for CXR and CT imaging of the chest owing to their demonstrated value in assessing lung patterns in patients infected with the coronavirus. As described by Akudjedu et al. (:8), to facilitate changes in work patterns during the coronavirus pandemic, managers in hospitals and radiography departments played an integral role in ensuring all aspects of operations management were adhered to. Tay et al. (:469) expressed that the need for leadership with the foresight to anticipate potential operational issues became crucial to managing operations in the face of the pandemic. New operations management adjustments at the study site that had to be implemented included dividing radiographers into two groups: one group on duty and the other off duty. This was to restrict staffing levels across different modality units. Services such as mammography, bone mineral density scanning, fluoroscopy and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examinations that were deemed non-urgent were suspended. Diagnostic radiography middle managers had to adapt to the sudden operational adjustments that constantly changed as the pandemic progressed. Since the onset of the pandemic, a substantial body of published research has reported on the effects of the pandemic on nurse practitioners and radiographers, with limited available literature on the management strategies employed by DRMMs during the pandemic (Aljondi et al. 2021; Blake et al. ; Chinene ; Hundah et al. ; Jorge & Fridell ; Lewis & Mulla ; Naylor et al. ; Ogolodom et al. ; Ruiz et al. ; Sehularo et al. ; Tariq et al. ; Williams et al. ; Zervides et al. ). From the researcher’s experience, various new working requirements were implemented by DRMMs, and radiographers had to learn how to adapt to the latest health and safety regulations to safely work with highly infectious patients. The need for a change in workflow, facilitated by DRMMs, was necessary to minimise the risk of cross-infection within the radiology department and the hospital. In addition to their daily duties, DRMMs had to put policies, plans and protocols in place while at the same time experiencing tremendous uncertainty. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the experiences of DRMMs during the COVID-19 pandemic and the management strategies they applied. The study was conducted among 11 DRMMs working across various branches of a private radiology practice that operates in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. The private radiology practice is a leading diagnostic imaging group offering a wide range of imaging modalities, including X-rays, CT, MRI and ultrasound. The radiology practice provides patient-centred services across hospital-based and outpatient settings, with emergency radiology support and 24-h operations at key hospital sites. This study employed an exploratory and descriptive qualitative approach using a case study design, underpinned by an interpretivist perspective. Lester, Cho and Lochmiller (:96) regard qualitative data analysis as a means of bringing meaning to a dataset through conversational data, observations and