Instrumental measurements of recovery-oriented practice in psychiatric services

A team of community and rehabilitation staff from a regional mental hospital in Hong Kong has been adopting recovery-oriented practices since 2010 to enhance its services through organizational transformation. The REFOCUS model of the Recovery College of Maudsley Hospital has adopted a tool called INSPIRE, which measures the level of support and relationship. In this study, service users were invited to rate the received support and their relationship with service providers to benchmark our current service before we fully implement the REFOCUS model of practice.

INSPIRE was translated into traditional Chinese. Service users were invited to use C-INSPIRE to score one service provider with whom they had the most frequent contact or had the closest relationship.

A total of 147 subjects were recruited from different service units at different phases of organizational transformation in recovery-oriented practice. Significantly higher scores in the Relationship Subscale (P = .028) were obtained by units that had introduced recovery-oriented practice for a longer period. However, the overall INSPIRE scores in the Support and Relationship Subscales achieved by Kwai Chung Hospital were 60 and 70, respectively, which were lower than those recorded (72 and 78, respectively) in a study conducted in the United Kingdom. This indicates that there is considerable room for improvement in the delivery of recovery-oriented practice at Kwai Chung Hospital.

With further training and implementation of REFOCUS for all staff, service users' experience in their recovery can be more empowering and satisfying.