A narrative-based approach sees attentive listening, careful inquiry, and the attempt to offer opportunities for easier and more creative narration as the basis of all professional work. Narrative ideas offer a conceptual framework for understanding all the different discourses – professional, scientific and political ones, together with lay or folk accounts of the world – that have to be integrated into everyday work. Narrative ideas can also provide professionals with the skills to help themselves, along with clients and colleagues, to question, re-evaluate and continually adjust their own understanding. Although narrative ideas have now taken hold in health and social care, there is another related field where they have been around for far longer – the field of family therapy, where the ideas set out in this book originated. The words "systemic" and "narrative" have acquired slightly different meanings in the world of health to that of social care.