Recovery-oriented mental healthcare

I commend Drs Lester & Gask (Lester & Gask, 2006) on their excellent and challenging editorial highlighting some of the issues involved in the development of high-quality recovery-oriented mental healthcare. Having begun my medical training in New Zealand, where recovery is heavily embedded into every facet of mental health services (Mental Health Commission, 1998), I have watched with interest the emerging prominence of recovery as a model for services in the UK. I would like to suggest two further avenues that are central to this continued evolution.

The first is to integrate recovery into the training of all psychiatrists. As the editorial rightly states, ‘promoting recovery’ is seen as an essential capability for all mental health professionals (Department of Health, 2004). We have an opportunity, while implementing the greatest change to modern medical training in the UK to date, to ensure that knowledge and skills in recovery-based practice are core competencies of psychiatric trainees. The current provisional curriculum pays little more than lip service to this crucial component, stating that trainees should be able to ‘describe the principles of rehabilitation and recovery’ in the context of treating chronic illness (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2006). If we are to produce psychiatrists with the ability to ‘promote recovery’, the principles need to be a component of all areas of clinical training as is the case within the development of nurse training in the Chief Nursing Officer's recent and appropriately titled report, From Values to Action (Department of Health, 2006).

Second, we need to find methods and tools to meaningfully measure the recovery orientation of our services. There are currently no fully developed tools to achieve this, but the most promising recovery-sensitive measures require collaborative work with service users in their implementation, thus ensuring that the recovery principles measured become a core component of service evaluations, development and research.

As the Royal College of Psychiatrists moves towards 2007, when its annual meeting will embrace recovery as its core theme, I join the authors of this editorial in their call for recovery to play an increasingly central role in all areas of psychiatry.