Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health

Mental health services need to transform their workforce to implement recovery, says Sainsbury Centre paper

9 September 2009

Mental health trusts should actively recruit people with personal experience of using services, according to a paper published today by Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health.

Implementing Recovery, by Dr Jed Boardman and Prof Geoff Shepherd, sets out the ten major challenges for mental health services to put recovery at the heart of their everyday practice.

Implementing Recovery calls on mental health services in Britain to make radical changes to the way they work with service users and how they are organised. Every interaction with service users should assist them to take control of their lives and increase opportunities for a 'life beyond illness'.

It recommends that every NHS mental health trust establishes a 'Recovery Education Unit' to train and support people with lived experience of mental illness to tell their stories and promote awareness of recovery principles. These units would also begin to train a new generation of 'peer professionals' to provide direct care within local services. The paper suggests that, over time, up to 50% of mental health care could be delivered by peer professionals, with existing professional staff working alongside them.

Dr Jed Boardman said: "The principles and values of recovery need to be at the heart of everything mental health services offer. Their core purpose should be to help people to build meaningful lives for themselves, with or without mental health symptoms. Implementing Recovery provides a framework for organisations that provide mental health care to make the radical changes we believe are necessary to put recovery centre stage."

Geoff Shepherd said, "Implementing recovery requires a major transformation in the culture of mental health services. It means supporting people to take much greater control over the way that they are treated. It means challenging stigma and discrimination much more assertively in communities. And it requires mental health professionals to work in a very different way to support service users' own priorities and their hopes for the future."