I work for the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) as Head of Participation. My job is to make sure that everything SCIE does involves users and carers. My job also involves producing reports, leaflets, films and websites about involvement. I became involved in public involvement in research because of my experiences of using mental health services. Public involvement in research is important to me because I think that people who have direct experience of using health and social care services have a perspective that can be absent from traditional research. At SCIE we often work with user-led groups, carer groups and user researchers. If we commission work from universities we ask them to tell us how they are going to involve service users and carers. Before SCIE I worked at the Service User Research Enterprise (SURE) on several user-led pieces of research.