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Supported employment programmes for people with serious mental health problems have sometimes been criticised for only helping people to get poorly paid, low skill jobs. Miles Rinaldi and colleagues followed up clients of the Kingston and Merton supported employment service run by South West London and St George's Mental Health NHS Trust and found that the majority had found, or retained, jobs in a wide range of occupations and at a wide range of levels. Few working at entry level, ‘just stacking shelves’.

The User Employment Programme at South West London & St George's Mental Health Trust pioneered user employment in mental health trusts. Eight years on, Miles Rinaldi and colleagues review the lessons learned to date and highlight some pitfalls to avoid and useful pointers for others embarking on this course. Key to its success has been the ongoing support and involvement of senior management, listening to and learning from users, and an incremental approach to breaking down the barriers between ‘them’ and ‘us’.

New research by the authors in the London Borough of Merton challenges three commonly held assumptions ‐ that mental health service users do not want to work, that work will make their condition worse, and that what they are really best suited to is sheltered work.

What does it mean to say there's an evidence base for supported employment? One approach, known as Individual placement and support or IPS for short, has been extensively evaluated and proven to help high numbers of people with severe mental health problems into work. But there is still little evidence of this approach being put into practice here in the UK. This article recalls a visit this year to the UK by Professor Bob Drake and colleagues from Dartmouth, New Hampshire, USA where the approach was developed, and explains the principles of supported employment and what it can mean for service users, staff, families and employers.

Increasingly mental health services are attempting to become recovery focused which demands changing the nature of day-to-day interactions and the quality of the experience in services. Care planning is the daily work of mental health services and within this context, care planning that enhances both the experience and the outcomes of a person's recovery is a key element for effective services. However, care plans, the care planning process and the Care Programme Approach (CPA) continue to pose a challenge for services. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues.

Conceptual paper.

Within recovery focused services a care plan becomes the driving force, or action plan, behind a person's recovery journey and is focused on their individual needs, strengths, aspirations and personal goals. If involving people directly in the development of their care plan is critical to creating better outcomes then supporting self-management, shared decision making and coproduction all underpin the care planning process. Based on the evidence of people's experience of care plans and the care planning process it is time to seriously debate our current conceptualisation and approach to care planning and the future of the CPA.

The paper describes aspects of the current situation with regard to the effectiveness of care planning in supporting a person's recovery. The paper raises some important questions.

Paul Brewer, one of the founder members of Sound Minds, describes a week in the run‐up to Christmans.

Should mental health workers be subsidising service users' expenses on trips and outings? Ian Popperwell believes that the common practice of paying for meals, entry tickets and travel is patronising and stigmatising, and negates efforts to achieve social inclusion and independent living.