Establishing Recovery Colleges in mental healthcare services: A Royal Commission recommendation

Abstract

Recovery Colleges are an innovative education-based approach to support mental health recovery that, following the recent Royal Commission, will have to be established in every area mental health service within the state of Victoria. This paper describes the rationale, benefits and some of the key considerations to successfully establish Recovery Colleges. The establishment of Recovery Colleges has the potential to drive culture change within mental health services and embed recovery orientation within service provision as well as engaging service users in their own recovery journey. There are significant challenges, however, in implementing the collaborative, co-produced model within the constraints of a publicly funded mental health clinical service. This paper considers some of the practice implications for public mental health services in developing and integrating Recovery Colleges. The paper, like everything we do at the Recovery College, is co-produced and co-authored – in this case, by a lived experience expert, a medically trained expert and a research/writing expert.