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In recent years the imperative to involve service users and carers at every level of care, service and policy development has been extended to include involving users and carers in the training of health and social care professionals. Guidance on how this is to be achieved in practice is, however, limited. This paper describes work undertaken to explore how an Approved Social Work Programme in the north of England could involve service users and carers more fully and develop an integrated approach to service user and carer involvement in this and other social work programmes. Following a review of the literature in this area, the results of a series of meetings with individual and groups of service users and carers are presented, together with a survey of ASW programmes. It then goes on to consider the implications for service user and carer involvement in the new social work degree.

Data Mining procedures were used to analyze responses of 173 missionaries surveyed about the nature and impact of traumatic stress (TS) they may have experienced while on the field. TS was almost universal, with the most frequent types involving system failure or personal crisis; there was also a high incidence of permanent negative change in those reporting TS, and over a third of these reported continuing symptoms almost a decade post-incident. Non-catastrophic stressors and stressors involving System Failure (particularly those with peer-System Failure) had higher TS impact. Severity, as seen in Total Impact and Total Number of Symptoms, was related to permanent negative change, as was age, with younger missionaries (possibly a generational rather than age or experience issue) being more vulnerable. Both destructive and salutogenic change were associated with TS, but no predictive variables were found for the latter.

Within the mixed economy of care in the United Kingdom there are debates about the ways in which impact can be evaluated, in order to shape funding and policy decisions. One of the tensions evident in this debate is whether the evaluation approach should reflect the perspectives and goals of the voluntary organizations and their members, or whether evaluation should reflect the wider goals of the whole system of provision. The former runs the risk of being insular and self-congratulatory, while the latter may be inappropriate and dismissive of achievements. This paper explores this tension by reporting on a study that used Appreciative Inquiry to evaluate 10 small-scale not-for-profit schemes for older people. The data indicated some unexpected and long-term impacts that demonstrated the distinctiveness of the sector. Subsequently the findings were mapped on to the "impact grid" developed by Wilding and Lacey (2003). While this was straightforward at the levels of individuals and interorganizationally, it was more difficult at the sector/community level, suggesting that more work needs to be done to bring these two perspectives together.

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