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Home Activities and Projects Realising Recovery Background to development

Background to development

The Realising Recovery Learning Materials were developed as a result of the Review of Mental Health Nursing in Scotland. Rights, Relationships and Recovery, the report of the review of mental health nursing in Scotland and accompanying five year action plan, was published in April 2006.

The report was devised in partnership with all of the various mental health stakeholder groups including service users and carers who had a strong voice in the review. The report provided a positive new direction for mental health nursing in Scotland and set out a value base about creating respectful and hopeful relationships with service users and carers.

One of the key actions of the report was to produce new recovery learning materials. To inform this process SRN and NHS Education for Scotland worked jointly to firstly produce a national training framework in relation to recovery identifying:
  • What nurses and other mental health practitioners needed to know (knowledge)
  • What practitioners should be able to do (skills)
  • What attitudes practitioners needed to be able to work in a recovery focussed way (values)
In order to develop this Framework a lot of activity took place including looking at what other countries had done to encourage people to work in more recovery focussed ways, finding out about current training available here in Scotland, across the UK and internationally and speaking with mental health workers and service users across Scotland. The SRN’s narrative research was also used as a key source of information about what helps and hinders recovery.

Read more about The 10 Essential Shared Capabilities (Scotland) and other training and education developments in relation to the review of mental health nursing in Scotland here.