As a national development centre SDC provides support to local and national organisations and networks, working collaboratively to feed lessons from policy into practice and practice into policy.

Much of SDC’s work is responsive to direct requests for assistance, but commissioning agents may be unsure of the exact nature of the changes their organisation or team needs to undertake. SDC is therefore able to help clients identify their development needs and provide good practice advice on how best these can be addressed .

When responding to a local area's requests for organisational development support, SDC aims to draw on lessons it has learnt through research, and often the development programme works jointly with the research programme. Examples of this include:

• Evaluation of the Intensive Home Treatment Team in Forth Valley;
  
  
• Research into Service Users’ Perceptions of the Impact of the Mental Health Act, in Fife;
  
  
• Evaluation of Restart for Recovery, the Forth Sector employability project;
  
  
• Evaluation of Falkirk and District Mental Health Association’s Mental Health Crisis and Out of Hours Support Service.