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How can clinical psychologists promote social inclusion in their practice? Mark Hayward, Emily Brown, Rufus May and Emma Harding offer a variety of perspectives from professional and service user viewpoints.

National policies suggest that service users and carers should be involved in health care planning and delivery. Initiatives to involve service users and carers within the education of mental health professionals have been reported. However, there has been no initiative to involve such individuals in the selection of clinical psychologists. This study examines the experiences of service users, carers and members of the Doctorate of Clinical Psychology programme in the implementation of a new interview task for the selection of trainee clinical psychologists at the University of Surrey. This new initiative involves service users, carers and staff members working collaboratively to assess candidates in a discussion based task. The study employed two focus groups, one pre‐selection and one post‐selection, and used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to evaluate participants' expectations and experiences of the task. The findings suggest that there was genuine collaboration between service users, carers and programme team members that was deeply engrained in the programme ethos and was a step forward in normalising and empowering service users and their carers. Interviewers felt that this task helped select a different calibre of applicants who had an awareness of the perspective of service users and carers and were able to communicate effectively. Interviewers viewed applicants who were able to disclose and take ownership of their views favourably. The introduction of a successful new interview task at Surrey has set a marker for future collaboration with service users and carers in selection, which will have implications for other doctorate programmes in clinical psychology and the broader health care training community.

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.

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.

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.

The integration of peer support workers with lived experience of mental health problems into existing mental health services has been found beneficial in some ways. However, some peer support workers have experienced unique challenges in terms of role confusion and limited opportunities for networking and support. Qualitative research and evaluation regarding peer support worker integration is limited. This paper aims to address this issue.

The current paper presents a qualitative evaluation of the experiences of two peer support specialist (PSS) workers and their managers within one UK mental health trust. The PSS workers and managers were interviewed individually using a semi‐structured format. Thematic analysis was applied to the interview transcripts.

In agreement with prior research and evaluation, positive experiences and challenges were identified in relation to PSS employment, both for PSS workers and their teams. Overarching themes concern the PSS worker as “other”, the PSS worker as a “change agent”, and “readiness for PSS worker employment”.

The evaluation is limited by the small sample size but the findings could be used to inform the integration of PSS workers into other existing services. This evaluation begins to untangle some of the tensions around the integration process. Strategies to support PSS integration based on the recommendations of participants and the findings of the current evaluation are presented.

This paper presents the results of a state of the art postal questionnaire survey from 132 manufacturing companies based in the UK. Also outlined are the trends in the profile of quality circle programmes of some 40 companies over a period of around 12 months. The main trends include circle leadership passing from supervision to a member of the shop floor workforce, an increase in the number of circles selecting quality as a project theme and a decrease in the circle meeting frequency. From the findings it is clear that some middle managers feel threatened by quality circle activities. A list of reasons for this is given along with suggestions to reverse such attitudes. It is also pointed out that a number of companies are still trying to short‐circuit the factors that are important in quality circle programme success.

This index covers all issues between February 2005 (Volume 9, Issue 1) and November 2008 (Volume 12, Issue 4). Numbers in bold refer to yolume, numbers in brackets refer to issue, with subsequent numbers to pages.

The purpose of this paper is to explore Bryan Stevenson’s (2014, 2015) call to action from within two emergent schools of thought in criminology, “cultural criminology,” and “convict criminology”, which share a special concern with the contributions that criminological research makes to a climate of social control and punishment. The author’s central aim is to explore the capacity of what the author argues is a potentially under-leveraged tool of social change – the philosophies underlying and implemented in cultural and convict criminology.

To demonstrate the potential impact of this research, the author draws upon a purposive sample of qualitative studies that exemplify the particular emotive, moral, and aesthetic goals central to Stevenson’s call to action. The impact of the production of images of crime, crime control, and criminals that emerge in the development of the paradigms central to cultural and convict criminology is finally discussed in terms of Stevenson’s four prescriptions for social and criminal justice reform.

The underlying philosophies, theoretical assumptions, and methodological approaches dictated by convict and cultural criminology are uniquely equipped to make visible the forces linked to resistance to penal and social reform.

In synthesizing cultural criminology and the emergent convict criminology as guides to doing empirical research, and identifying each as embodying Stevenson’s call to action, the author hopes – maybe not to extract those easily ignitable, invisible forces away from reform efforts entirely, but at least – to provide those who are interested with a more nuanced map of where they are not likely to live and breathe them. Stimulating and widening the criminological imagination might not satisfy our need to quickly and concretely apply a solution to injustice, but it might be what the problem demands.

Stevenson (2014) argues that the extent of injustice in the US criminal justice system is so pervasive, extraordinary, and long standing, that everyone has a role to play in the course of our everyday lives in turning the tide of indifference and cruelty that feed mass injustice and incarceration. Applying his proposals to the on-the-ground working lives of empirical criminologists holds potential for effecting change from the top-down.