Evaluating Recovery in Practice Training

Last year we commissioned Health in Mind and Penumbra to deliver a new training course, aimed at people who worked in the voluntary sector, called Recovery in Practice. Given the nature of this new course we were keen to learn more about how well it had worked so we commissioned an independent evaluation of the training, led by Jacki Gordon + Associates and we are now delighted to publish the findings.    

The materials were adapted from the 10 Essential Shared Capabilities and Realising Recovery Learning materials and the course was intended to be an introduction to values based and recovery focused practice.

The free, two day, course ran in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and twice in Glasgow with around 20 people participating each time. The overall findings were encouraging with particularly positive views reported directly after the training, both in relation to course content and delivery. Follow up interviews with a smaller group of participants provided a more complex picture with more questioning of content and format and limited evidence of the extent to which people had implemented their learning at this stage.

A tool developed for the research identified modest shifts in participant attitudes and the research suggests that the training reinforced recovery beliefs, though some participants reported feeling that the course content were largely in line with their organisations existing values and practices.

Commenting on the report William Ellis, SRI Project Lead, said: “This report confirms that training is an important aspect of developing recovery focused practice but that on its own its impact will be limited within organisations. Any learning needs to be supported, encouraged and shared throughout the organisation and importantly a commitment to recovery values needs to exist throughout.

Although SRN have no plans to make this training more widely available there are a range of other resources that voluntary organisations can use which support the development of recovery focused services including the Scottish Recovery Indicator and Realising Recovery training materials. We are also happy to discuss how we might support voluntary organisations in their efforts to promote recovery focused practice.

 Evaluation of Recovery in Practice Training (719.94 kB)