Developing a recovery college: a preliminary exercise in establishing regional readiness and community needs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.