Nursing, Therapeutic, and Rehabilitation Specialists: Perspectives on Recovery-Centric Care in Inpatient Psychiatry

Abstract

Patient care grounded in the principles of recovery is increasingly relevant in treating persons with mental illness. Although institutions embrace the concept, conveying recovery as an idea and its inherent principles into practice remains challenging in inpatient psychiatry. Through a pre and post-test, mixed methods design, this study explored staff understanding, perspectives, and attitudes toward recovery-oriented approaches before and after the implementation of a novel recovery program. Forty staff members from a tertiary-level psychiatric facility participated in the study over an eight- month intervention period. Relational security was used as an empirical proxy measure of therapeutic maturity indicative of recovery-oriented readiness. Self-report survey results indicated strong relational security practices in place prior to the intervention test phase, with reported improvements post-test. The qualitative assessment of staff understanding and attitudes toward strength-based care and positive risk-taking, two essential competencies of the recovery model, contradicted the survey findings, revealing a treatment model rooted in paternalism, risk-aversion, and deficit-driven care. The study highlights the entrenchment of the illness-based approach in institutional mental health care despite receptivity to recovery ideals. It also suggests that ordinal data from staff surveys, although informative, must be interpreted with caution. Institutions might benefit from a more fulsome qualitative exploration of culture, policy, and praxes when adopting recovery-oriented approaches into traditionally biomedical-driven care settings.