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Assertive outreach is based on extensive international research and has been promoted in the UK in 1999 as a key area of the National Service Framework for Mental Health. Its primary aim is to provide a specialist service for people disengaged from traditional approaches of mental health services, but very little attention has been paid to how such services can be developed. Practice Based Evidence, a practice development consultancy, has engaged seven assertive outreach teams to focus on development first, and follow‐up evaluation of the impact of reflective practice on team functioning. This has prompted a number of strengths‐based recommendations for changing the way we think about developing services before we engage in research and evaluation.

Meeting the complex needs of people with severe and enduring mental health problems who are difficult to engage poses a formidable challenge for service providers. An evaluation of a small interagency multi‐disciplinary team in Aberdeen providing assertive outreach for this group identified the key features which helped to sustain clients' lives in the community.

Aims to describe the change in bed day usage of patients referred to an assertive outreach team. The setting is an outer borough of London. Describes the method as a retrospective longitudinal study in a group of 62 patients, examining their bed day usage before and after they were referred to the assertive outreach team. States the results and clinical implications as in‐patient bed day utilisation, a useful marker of service utilisation, was reduced significantly for patients following referral to the assertive outreach team. Provides a benchmark for newly established assertive outreach teams, which can be used to compare and evaluate the performance of other such services.

Assertive outreach teams are working with a significant proportion of people with complex needs, including dual diagnosis. Government policy has highlighted the role of assertive outreach in engaging and intervening with this group. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a specific team‐focused training package and its trial in the Eastern and West Midlands regions.

Assertive outreach teams work with some individuals who experience severe problems and are also injecting drug users. These people can be at risk due to their injecting behaviour, and also not be in contact with harm reduction agencies. This article describes, through case discussion, a collaborative initiative where assertive outreach case managers and harm reduction workers worked together to provide an individual harm reduction service to this vulnerable group. The project successfully engaged service users and was able to deliver harm reduction support.

When the International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) was developed, one of the hopes was that the exchange visits among international sites would stimulate the development of collaborative working relationships. This article reviews one such collaborative project, the development and implementation of a comparative study of assertive community treatment teams, or assertive outreach teams as they are called in the UK and New Zealand.

A tool was created to evaluate the socially inclusive practice of mental health teams. The tool was based on the 2007 Department of Health best practice guide for the workforce, Capabilities for Inclusive Practice (CfIP), itself based on The 10 Essential Shared Capabilities (Hope, 2004). The tool comprised three parts, a team questionnaire, a service user questionnaire, and a Care Programme Approach (CPA) care plan documentation analysis (see previous paper on pp31‐41). This paper focuses on piloting the tool with mental health teams within Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust as a means of showcasing the evaluation tool. Detailed findings are reported from one assertive outreach team (AOT). The findings suggest that although the team professed limited knowledge of CfIP, they endorsed all capabilities in their practice, although a low response rate limits the extent to which the current findings are generalisable. The triangulation of data provided by the tool facilitates an exploration of the variance of capabilities across team, service user, and care planning perspectives, meaning that specific areas for the improvement of the delivery of inclusive practice can be easily identified.

Capital is a user‐led training, consultancy and research organisation based in West Sussex. When the local mental health trust decided to evaluate its assertive outreach team, Capital bid to conduct a qualitative review through one‐to‐one interviews with the team's clients and their carers. In this candid article the project team members describe the process, the hurdles and obstacles they encountered, how they were negotiated or overcome, and what they learned from the experience.