Centre for Mental Health

The beginning - Recovery into Practice

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

To do this, we 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.

Publications

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.

Workshops

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.

What's next

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: Supporting Recovery through Organisational Change.