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Recent drives to modernise the mental health workforce have been led (in England) by initiatives such as New Ways of Working and informed by the Ten Essential Shared Capabilities (10 ESCs) (Department of Health, 2004), reflected elsewhere in the UK. Learning materials have been developed to support these and educators encouraged to embed them within curricula. Yet, little has been said about how such principles could or should apply to the practice of mental health educators themselves. Higher education plays a crucial part in shaping tomorrow's practitioners; yet educators can receive scant mention when workforce initiatives are launched. Here, then, we consider the 10 ESCs, examining how these might be put into practice in a higher education context. The pedagogic rationale for this perspective is discussed in terms of Biggs' (2003) concept of ‘constructive alignment’, Ward's (1999) ‘matching principle’ and Eraut's (1994) analysis of ‘professional education’. Reconceptualising higher education educators as a part (albeit semi‐detached) of the mental health workforce may help us move beyond a ‘tick‐box’ approach ‐ exploring not only whether the 10 ESCs are reflected in the content of curricula, but how they are embodied within teaching teams.

The 10 Essential Shared Capabilities (ESC) are a description of the core aspects of practice that support effective implementation and delivery of mental health care. The ESC have been derived directly from work with users, carers and mental health personnel. To support their introduction a learning pack was developed giving examples of the 10 ESC as they relate to current practice.A pilot programme across England was developed to test the acceptability and potential utility of these materials and this paper reports on the evaluation of that pilot programme. Facilitators (n=75) and learners (n=579) were asked to rate each of the seven modules contained in the learning pack. A number of recommendations have been made to improve the materials that are being acted upon.

This paper will review aspects of current policy in mental health with specific reference to policy that has a values focus. In this context, values refers to the standards and expectations we hold and which we use to guide aspects of practice performance. Service users state that core values that support, respect choice, collaboration, and customer service are critical foundation stones of a trusting therapeutic relationship. Attending to these foundations for practice has merit in ensuring the quality of care delivery in mental health. This paper will analyse what this means for the mental health workforce in their engagement with service users and delivery of policy priorities. Finally, the paper will explore resources, such as the Ten Essential Shared Capabilities (see Appendix 1), which support engagement and ongoing promotion of person‐centred mental health care.

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.

This paper is the first of two linked articles that explores a shared learning approach to developing a module on collaborative working for graduate primary care mental health workers (PCMHWs). The article describes how the policy context shaped the training agenda and how the requirements of the roles and responsibilities in respect of collaborative practice were mapped against the Ten Essential Capabilities of the mental health workforce. The process of constructive alignment (Biggs, 1999) that involves matching teaching and assessment methods to intended learning objectives was used alongside evidence from the research literature on systems working and interprofessional education to inform the design of the modular curriculum in more detail.The second paper will provide an in‐depth evaluation of the module as it was delivered using a framework derived from the academic literature (See Bailey & Littlechild, 2001 and Barr et al, 1999a; 1999b). Included in the evaluation will be a discussion of how the context of workforce change in primary care mental health influenced the training inputs together with a reflection on the training methodologies employed to promote collaborative practice. Different levels of evaluating the training will be discussed including the impact of the module on practice outcomes such as attitudes of the workers and changes in their practice. The lessons learned from the evaluation will be discussed in relation to the models of best practice emerging from the IPE literature and the challenges of implementing a new workforce strategy in primary care mental health.

Dual diagnosis poses particular challenges for inpatient mental health services. Workers have low levels of training, clinical experience and support to deliver integrated care that combines mental health and substance use interventions. In addition, inpatient workers have to balance being therapeutic with ensuring that illicit substance use does not occur on the wards. This often leads to confrontation and poor engagement.In order to improve the capabilities of the workers to deliver more effective interventions for this group of service users, dual diagnosis training should be a high priority for acute inpatient services. However, there are a number of challenges in the implementation of this including lack of resources to fund training and specialist roles, lack of time to attend training (and supervision), and lack of time to implement learning in routine care.This paper will describe the policy drivers for the improvement of dual diagnosis care in acute psychiatric inpatient services, and how two initiatives in London are overcoming some of the obstacles and showing some promising initial outcomes. This paper will make recommendations for future research and developments.

This paper gives an overview of the development and pilot implementation of a tool to evaluate socially inclusive practice. There are strong links between social inclusion and better mental health outcomes for people who access services, yet a very limited amount of research exists concerning ways to evaluate socially inclusive practice within mental health services. The paper describes the creation of a tripartite tool to access the views of mental health teams who work with service users, and the service users themselves. As part of the movement towards recovery and social inclusion, the Department of Health requires that social and occupational needs become embedded in care plans alongside health needs (DoH, 1999), and so an analysis of care plan documentation completed the evaluation tool. A pilot evaluation was conducted with three mental health teams in Sussex and found issues with engagement and response rate. Lessons learned and future implications are discussed.

It is difficult to replicate evidence-informed models of psychosocial and assertive care interventions in non-research settings, and means to determine workforce capability for psychosocial therapies have not been readily available. The purpose of this paper is to describe and provide a rationale for the Therapy Capability Framework (TCF) which aims to enhance access to, and quality of, evidence-informed practice for consumers of mental health services (MHSs) by strengthening workforce capabilities and leadership for psychosocial therapies.

Guided by literature regarding the inadequacies and inconsistencies of evidence-informed practice provided by publicly-funded MHSs, this descriptive paper details the TCF and its application to enhance leadership and provision of evidence-informed psychosocial therapies within multi-disciplinary teams.

The TCF affords both individual and strategic workforce development opportunities. Applying the TCF as a service-wide workforce strategy may assist publicly-funded mental health leaders, and other speciality health services, establish a culture that values leadership, efficiency, and evidence-informed practice.

This paper introduces the TCF as an innovation to assist publicly-funded mental health leaders to transform standard case management roles to provide more evidence-informed psychosocial therapies. This may have clinical and cost-effective outcomes for public MHSs, the consumers, carers, and family members.

This paper focuses on a shared learning module on collaborative practice for graduate primary care mental health workers as a case study in formative evaluation that combines qualitative and quantitative methods. Evaluation data are collected across four levels in an attempt to explore issues relating to:• curriculum content• training methods and design• PCMHWs' experiences of the training• outcomes in respect of attitude change and self‐reported changes in knowledge, skills and practice.The paper draws on a review of inter‐professional education undertaken by the British Education Research Association (BERA) to explore what interactive methods of learning are employed in the delivery of the module as a means of fostering improved collaborative practice that can be transferred from the learning environment to the primary care mental health setting. According to Barr et al (2005, p31) inter‐professional education takes place on ‘occasions when two or more professions learn with, from and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care’.The paper concludes that although limited in its generalisability and the extent to which changes in attitudes and practice can be attributed to the training intervention, there are some useful lessons to be learned for planning and delivering training to promote collaborative working within primary care mental health.

People with dual diagnosis have complex needs and vulnerabilities that may lead to incarceration in prisons. Mental health and substance use services in prisons should have the capabilities to address their needs while incarcerated and facilitate the transfer of care to community services on release. In order to develop these capabilities, a training programme is required.A pilot training programme for dual diagnosis was developed and piloted in five London prisons. The training was based on a training needs assessment of prison staff and consultation with service users. It was delivered in two forms: a five‐day classroom based course, and a ‘blended learning’ method that comprised a manual and three sessions of supervision. The course was evaluated by a brief questionnaire that included items on attitudes, self‐efficacy and knowledge about working with dual diagnosis.The evaluation of the training revealed that all workers, no matter what method of training they received increased their perception of their skills (self‐efficacy) and increased their attitudes. Knowledge remained the same (although the scores pre‐training were high). There was no difference between the two types of training when mean scores were compared at post‐training. There was also no difference between the mental health and substance workers regarding their mean scores at follow‐up, apart from knowledge.The conclusion is that the training pilot was evaluated positively and did indicate that it has some effect on attitudes and self‐efficacy. More rigorous evaluation of the impact of the training is required, using a robust methodology and assessing the impact on clinical skills and service user outcomes.