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This paper seeks to discuss the authors' experiences of multidisciplinary practice in relation to developing home‐based assisted living technologies.

The paper draws on almost three years' experience of working within an ongoing, large, multi‐sited and multidisciplinary Irish national research programme: the Technology for Independent Living Centre. This involved industry and academic partners. Teams of clinicians, physical and social scientists, technologists, engineers, designers and ethnographers worked with older adults to design, test and deliver, home‐based technologies that focus on mitigating falls, keeping socially connected and maintaining or improving cognitive function. The authors' experiences and challenges are organised and presented through their retrospective team building model: ENDEA and through comparison with team building literature.

Learning outcomes and implications for technology focused multidisciplinary practice are offered. The paper concludes that a vital step in developing successful assisted living technologies with and for older adults is to spend resources on building effective, creative and committed multidisciplinary teams and practices.

The model, ENDEA, is proposed which is a blueprint for successful outcomes, through the management and delivery of multidisciplinary research.

Participation is the active involvement of children and young people in decision-making regarding issues that affect their lives. It is crucial in the context of child protection and welfare systems and how they respond to the needs of children and young people. The purpose of this paper is to report on the evaluation of child and family participation in an early intervention and prevention programme implemented by the Irish Child and Family Agency. It provides an analysis of a comprehensive, “whole organization” approach to understand how participation is embedded in policy and practice.

This paper reports on a comparative qualitative case study of the perspectives of managers and practitioners about participation practice, identifying the facilitators and barriers, as well as their perspectives of the sustainability of participation within the agency and its partners. The authors draw on two complementary, theoretically informed studies evaluating participatory practice within the Agency using qualitative interviews with participants.

Overall, managers and practitioners had a positive attitude towards participation and identified examples of best practices. Facilitators included training, access to resources and the quality of relationships. Challenges for meaningful participation remain, such as the need to engage, hard to reach populations. Differences were identified regarding how embedded and sustainable participation was.

This paper provides a critical understanding of participation in practice and how to embed a culture of participation in child protection and welfare.