These words, from a parent talking about participating in an initial child protection conference, encapsulate the tension at play when service users participate in multi-agency meetings in social welfare. The number of participants alone can make the meetings hard to ‘take in’, and differences in status confer predetermined roles of judging and being judged before the meetings even begin. At the same time, however, multi-agency meetings constitute an opportunity for shared discussions that may increase both cooperation and understanding between different professionals and service users. It is this opportunity that has made meetings where professionals from different disciplines and service users are co-present become commonplace in health and social welfare in Western welfare states. This has happened as part of a larger development, where collaborative and integrated welfare is promoted as a solution to the perceived ineffectiveness of health and social services that are professional-led and dispersed (Kitto et al, 2011). Two themes in particular are presented as essential for the success of collaborative and integrated welfare: interprofessional collaboration and service user participation. This book is about how such aims are realised in multi-agency meetings. The words of the parent that open this chapter represent a service user's reflections on a meeting after the event. By contrast, this book analyses audio- and video-recordings of the naturally occurring interactions that ‘talk the meetings into being’.

Multi-agency meetings are understood as boundary spaces where professionals from different disciplines and welfare agencies, service users and their lay representatives are brought together to work on a common task.