Professional Support, London: the professional development unit supporting practitioner well-being, refreshment, remediation and revalidation.

London' s Professional Support Unit (PSU) was launched in April 2012 at a time when changes and financial pressures across the health service were placing considerable demand on the medical and dental workforce. At the same time the infrastructure to support medical revalidation was established. The PSU provides developmental support to clinicians across London in all career grades and specialities, to sustain and restore them to contribute effectively to health service delivery across the capital.

What matters to users of services? An explorative study to promote shared decision making in health care.

Background: Involving service users and carers in decisions about their health care is a key feature of health-care practice. Professional health and social care students need to develop skills and attributes to best enable this to happen.

Aims: The aims were to explore service user and carer perceptions of behaviours, attributes and context required to enable shared decision making; to compare these perceptions to those of students and academic staff with a view to utilizing the findings to inform the development of student assessment tools.

Learning for real life: patient-focused interprofessional workshops offer added value.

Objectives: This paper reports relevant findings of a pilot interprofessional education (IPE) project in the Schools of Medicine and Healthcare Studies at the University of Leeds. The purpose of the paper is to make a contribution towards answering 2 questions of fundamental importance to the development of IPE. Is there a demonstrable value to learning together? What types of IPE, under what circumstances, produce what type of outcomes?

Design: Pre-registration house officers (PRHOs), student nurses and pre-registration pharmacists attended a series of 3 workshops intended to develop participants' understanding about each other's professional roles, to enhance teamworking and to develop communication skills.