Refocus Promoting recovery in community mental health services

Rethink believes that people with mental illness should be encouraged to achieve personal goals in all areas of life. We have worked for many years to make our 300 services more recovery-centred and want to use our experience to help other mental health services to become more person and
recovery-oriented.

The REFOCUS study involves a trial of a new approach to supporting mental health services to become more recovery-focused. The intervention used a mix of strategies to achieve this goal, including information sharing, personal recovery training and team reflection. This report will describe the different strategies, which we hope will be of use to professionals across the mental health world who are thinking about how to embed recovery in practice. Rethink is involved in the intervention by providing the personal recovery training, codelivered by people with personal experience of mental illness.