User participation and interprofessional collaboration in community care

User participation and interprofessional collaboration are both on the agenda for community care, with interprofessional work being one of the few ways that current initiatives in social policy formally recognise practitioner experience within service planning. An emphasis on managerialism, a day to day experience of reduced resources and a history of inadequate participation in the past, may lead both practitioners and users to caution and defensiveness. However there is evidence that participation can significantly improve collaboration by reducing an 'us and them' mentality between practitioners, re-establishing the interface between users and providers as central to the caring enterprise and re-focusing attention on the pathways that users travel rather than administrative divisions between sectors or services.