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Roger Butterworth has been a pioneering figure in the field of job retention services for people with mental health problems over the last decade ‐ both running services himself and encouraging others to do so. In this article he offers a personal view of the service landscape and recent developments.

The Avon & Western Wiltshire NHS Trust's Work Development Programme in Bristol is a Beacon award winner. This Department of Health award has been made for achievements in establishing a comprehensive vocational advice and support service for people with mental health difficulties ‐ starting from inside specialist mental health services. The funding attached is to enable the model and good practice to be shared more widely in the NHS. Central to the service model are close partnerships with occupational therapy as well as the employment service, further education and service providers from the voluntary sector. Roger Butterworth (who started it) and Jo Dean describe how the service was developed.

This poem was inspired by my work with service users from Mind in the Vale, in Glamorgan, south Wales and contains several examples of their lived experience, thoughts and feelings. I felt that a poem captured more vividly their rejections by society and why they have settled, often for the protection of the ‘mental health ghetto’, even if it is a form of apartheid.

This issue's Network gives space to a number of new job retention networks to describe what they do and what they are trying to achieve.

This article summarises the findings of the Care Programme to Work Project and describes some of the publications that it has produced. Care Programme to Work was a three‐year action research project, funded by the Department of Health and based at the Institute for Applied Health and Social Policy, King's College London (1998‐2001). The basis of the project was a partnership between the Institute, the London Borough of Sutton, Sheffield Community Health, and Manchester Health Authority.

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.