No / This paper will provide an overview of the specific issues related to involving service users and carers in work-based practice assessment of health and social care students. The outcomes of a shared workshop that involved service users and carers, practice assessors and students in the development of an interprofessional assessment tool, will be discussed. Key areas of concern, across all participants, were related to ethical, reliability and validity issues. These will be explored against the of current literature, and recommendations will be made for involving service users and carers in assessment of practice. The original work for this paper was part of the Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings (ALPS) Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), which is working towards a framework of interprofessional assessment of common competences in the health and social care professions.

No / The aim of this study was to evaluate newly developed performance feedback tools from the student perspective. The tools were innovative in both their mode of delivery and the range of stakeholders they involved in the feedback process. By using the tools in health and social care settings, students were able to engage in interprofessional assessment of common competences and obtain performance feedback from a range of stakeholders not commonly involved in work-based learning; these included peers and service users. This paper discusses the ways in which the performance feedback tools were developed by a collaborative programme and compares their delivery, across a wide range of professions and work-based settings, in paper-based, web-based and mobile formats. The tools were evaluated through a series of profession-specific focus groups involving 85 students and 7 professions. The data were analysed thematically and reduced to three key categories: mode of delivery, assessment tool dynamics and work-based issues. These will be discussed in detail. The students agreed that the structured way of capturing and documenting feedback from several sources would support their practice placement learning. The reflective nature of the tools and the capacity for guiding reflection was also welcomed. The concepts of gaining service user, peer and/or interprofessional feedback on performance were new to some professions and evoked questions of reliability and validity, alongside appreciation of the value they added to the assessment process.