Abstract
Background: Recovery orientated intervention has experienced a paradigm shift towards stakeholder training and education within recovery colleges. Such colleges are typically underpinned by a culture of emancipatory education that aims to facilitate recovery through educational choice.
Aims: The study aims to establish regional readiness for a recovery college. Specifically, we aim to uncover key stakeholder attitudes towards recovery, outline a contextual conceptualization of recovery and show how inductive, community-based research can incorporate stakeholder views with core fidelity markers of a recovery college.
Method: A mixed methods approach, specifically a cross-sectional survey, was adopted to intersect quantitative scales of stakeholder attitudes and qualitative assessment of recovery concepts and community needs.
Results: Stakeholders’ recovery attitudes were positive overall with some variation between participant groups. Concepts of recovery were developing independent abilities, establishing connectedness to support and as a journey. The needs cited by the stakeholders were largely correlated with the core fidelity markers of a recovery college.
Conclusion: A community psychology approach offers a means to ascertain regional readiness for a recovery college, and uncover key development foci based on community needs. We recommend that service areas adopt a similar approach when considering recovery-orientated service developments.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the support of the health service staff, service-users and academic professionals involved in the Mid-West ARI research sub-committee for their advice in developing our survey and supporting the research.
Declaration of interest
None.