Centre for Mental Health

Recovery into practice - our project

Recovery ideas and recovery orientated practice have the potential to radically transform mental health services and to alter traditional power relationships. We would like to open up discussion of how the recovery approach can be put into practice and what mental health services need to do to make it happen.

Supporting Recovery project

To do this, we have set up a project to develop guidance for NHS Trusts and other provider organizations on what they can do to implement recovery-orientated practice. To begin supporting recovery, we assembled a steering group representing five NHS Mental Health Trusts and their local partners, which had already made significant progress towards implementing more recovery-oriented services.

We then published our initial briefing paper Making Recovery a Reality, summarising the key principles - and the common objections - and raising some of the implementation problems.

We followed this with a series of local workshops, each addressing a different organisational challenge to services becoming more recovery-oriented. The workshops were attended by more than 300 professionals, managers, service users and carers. The outcomes of these workshops formed our second paper Implementing Recovery - A new framework for organisational change.

Implementing Recovery -
Organisational Change

Having developed a framework by which organisations might become more recovery-orientated, we are now embarking on a project to test it with NMHDU and the NHS Confederation.

We aim to field test the methodology for organisational change in 6 demonstration sites and help them to improve the quality of their local services to support people more effectively to lead meaningful and productive lives. This project provides an opportunity to demonstrate an innovative approach to quality improvement and cultural change across organisations. It is expected to run until 2011/12.

Each site will be supported to identify and progress through each of the ten challenges using a 3 point scale of 'Engagement', 'Development' or 'Transformation'.

Each organisation will receive an individually-tailored support package of expert consultancy, access to specialist, user-led training programmes and materials, and participation in a learning network. This will enable organisations to put a truly person-centred approach at the heart of service delivery with the aim of improving service user outcomes and satisfaction levels with service provision.

The project team of Jed Boardman, Rachel Perkins (South West London and St George's NHS Trust) and Geoff Shepherd will provide direct consultancy and advice on target setting and implementation to individual sites. Julie Repper from the University of Nottingham will provide specific help with training of service users and staff.

For more information about the project, contact Dawn Fleming on dawn.fleming@nhsconfed.org.

Apply to be a demonstration site

We are starting to select sites now. If you are interested in applying to be a demonstration site, please read the following information and complete the application form.

Download the background information (48 KB)

Download the application form (295 KB)

Please return the completed application form to claire.mallett@nhsconfed.org by 30 September 2010.