Over recent years there has been an increasing use of presentations for students who are struggling in, or have failed a practice placement on the qualifying social work programmes. This has often been set up following the student having attended a practice consultation panel at the request of member of the students' placement team. The presentations are aimed at improving the students' understanding of the issues that have led to their difficulties on placement and are therefore specific to that student. Some students have been asked to prepare just one presentation whilst others have been given up to 4 titles. The experience of the university placement team, and the practice agencies that offer a repeat placement is that it has led to an improvement in the outcome for many students as this has led to greater understanding of issues and therefore preparation for the repeat placement. Some of the students concerned have chosen at the end of the process of undertaking presentations that they will not complete the professional award and this decision has been clearer and based on better quality evidence and thinking. This paper considers the process, outcomes and potential gains of this system.

Intervention in Health-related and Mental Health-related Crises; and the much shorter 6) Evidence-based Practice and Research. Despite my reservations about the narrow individualistic approach rather than a holistic one that also incorporates sociological considerations, there is much of value, although to do justice to the complexity of the issues involved it would need to be adapted to introduce the missing critical sociological perspectives. Readers new to the topic and those already well versed in the literature relating to crisis, disaster and trauma will all find interesting (if frustratingly narrow and psychologistic) discussions of many aspects of the subject matter. This book should help to establish that crisis issues are much more of a central feature of people's lives than is generally realised -that is, it helps to support the notion that crisis intervention should not be seen as a specialist approach disconnected from mainstream practice. This is not a comprehensive handbook -its approach is far too narrow and traditional for that. I look forward to the day when we see a book on crisis intervention that does justice to the breadth and complexity of the issuessomething that the traditional literature base clearly fails to do.

users affected by the fall of communism or of civil war, and life in restrictive health and welfare institutions. This regional perspective highlights the relevance of narratives in passing on users' knowledge to professionals. Her text illustrates both how much social work has in common and how different the concrete challenges can be.Together, these three books form a good reading pack on social work education in East and West. Social problems at macro and micro level, the dayto-day delivery of courses and curriculum-related collaboration between East and West are equally well documented, as are various strands of theoretical work. There is evidence both of commonalities and discrepancies, and those looking for factual information will also find much of interest. Readers will, however, have to put up with stylistic heterogeneity, especially in Chytil and Seibel (1999). Information may be a bit more difficult to extract from some sources than from others, but, all in all, the exercise is a worthwhile one.As J. Szmagalski (in Marynowicz-Hetka et al., 1999: 233) notes, 'political, social and economic differences among the countries and regions of Europe result in a variety of issues facing local social services and social workers. But there are also common challenges for all social workers'. It is about finding the right balance between recognizing the common core while respecting diversity. The need to recognise the knowledge and expertise of social work in the East, demonstrated in a previous conference publication, Connelly and Stubbs (1997), has received powerful confirmation here. References

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