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The authors question the traditional approach to service design, which merely leads to model replication. In order to design a service effectively for a local community this article identifies a need for ‘outside‐in’ service design to truly reflect the needs and environment of a particular community. Using the example of volunteering projects, the authors identify nine key factors that impact on the effective implementation of projects and suggest that consideration of these should form a template for other outside‐in analyses by leaders. The authors pose a series of questions that leaders can apply to their own settings in order to explore the issues raised in this article.

This article describes the National Social Inclusion Programme's Communities of Influence workstream, the premises on which it was founded, the innovative social inclusion practice it proposed, what was learned and how the work will be taken forwards in the future.

This article explores some service development practices that help to promote social inclusion through day services modernisation (DSM). It is based on the experiences of one NHS trust that successfully negotiated the transition from segregated, buildings‐based in‐house day care services operating during working hours to ones that are individualised, person‐focused and operate at times and in places used also by the general public, providing individual, person‐to‐person support to enable recovery and quality of life in the wider community. Key to success is the concept of the modern, inclusive day service as a community bridge builder operating across a number of life domains and spanning the mental health/community boundary while retaining strong connections with the rest of the mental health system.

The concept of social inclusion features prominently in current policy and practice developments in mental health services. The Social Exclusion Unit (2006) highlighted the need for mental health day services to promote inclusion and participation, by integrating with the wider community, and by supporting and encouraging users to access opportunities in the local community. The Leeds i3 (inspire, improve, include) project aimed to modernise local mental health day services accordingly. The aim of our study was to develop and validate a measure of social inclusion to be used in mental health day services in Leeds. The underlying assumption was that recent changes in mental health day service provision would substantially improve social inclusion of the service users.The social inclusion questionnaire was developed through extensive iterative consultation with mental health service users and staff, and its reliability was proven using test‐retest statistics. It was shown to be a simple, inexpensive, user‐friendly and repeatable measure that could be used routinely by mental health day services. Factor analysis of the questionnaire showed that social inclusion had seven important components. We suggest that these components form a useful basis for discussion with service users, as well as for planning and evaluating services.

A quarterly review of recent and forthcoming developments within mental health policy.

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.

Supporting community participation and social inclusion is a key goal of modernised day services but there is a lack of instruments to measure these outcomes. This paper discusses issues around the measurement of social inclusion, presents a pilot study and introduces the Inclusion Web, a strategy to record changes in social networks and environment while supporting the concept of a shared perspective of social inclusion. Two aspects of social and community participation are quantified and tallied over eight life domains: people (personal relationships) and places (institutions that matter to the individual).