Lynn Joels and Liam Benison report on a conference held to showcase a toolkit to help with the introduction of health care asssitants into general practice

It was shocking to see images of nurses jeering the Secretary of State for Health, Patricia Hewitt, at the RCN Congress in Bournemouth on Wednesday. But nurses' anger over redundancies (at last count estimated at 7000) and the Secretary of State's handling of what to do about the mounting debt of NHS trusts is understandable.

This issue highlights the importance of the dialogue between practice nurse and patient. A number of writers consider ways to convince patients to do the things it is thought will improve their quality of life. Jeannett Martin, reporting from last month's national practice nurse conference in Sheffield, explains the ‘science of compliance’ (page 380). Vicky Padbury looks at the revised messages which are intended to help women understand how to use the contraceptive pill correctly (page 386). And, in the first article in a new series on the consultation, Adrienne Willcox and Eileen Munson review ways to approach discussions with patients in an age in which trust is no longer automatic (page 409).

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Those of us with relatives in a nursing home will have watched Sir Gerry Robinson′s investigation of standards in care homes for people with dementia, shown on BBC 2 recently (2009), with interest and concern.