Critical Analysis of Tools for Measuring Recovery-Oriented Practice in Mental Health Facilities: A Scoping Review.

Background: To implement recovery-oriented practice, it is important to have instruments capable of evaluating such practice. A number of different questionnaires have been developed in recent years which measure recovery orientation in mental health services.

Objective: To identify and analyze patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) reported in the literature that are related to recovery-oriented practice in mental health services.

Methodology: This study followed the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews. Searches were carried out in the Web of Science, CINAHL, Medline (via Pubmed), and SCOPUS databases and in grey literature repositories (Google Scholar, Opengrey, Dart-Europe, Teseo). Papers on recovery services for adults suffering from mental disorders (MDs) were included. Those focusing on addiction and intellectual disability care services were excluded.

Results: Sixteen papers met the inclusion criteria. The selected PREMs mainly identified recovery-oriented systems, treatment, community integration and support as the dimensions addressed most frequently in questionnaires. The average number of items included in the questionnaires was found to be 54. With regard to psychometric properties, 62% of the papers evaluated reliability (internal consistency) and 56% provided some kind of evidence of validity.

Conclusions: This review aims to give an overview of the existing instruments in the literature and to highlight the characteristics of each one of them. Several different PREMs exist which evaluate recovery-oriented practice. No instrument currently exists which could be described as a benchmark tool, but there are quite a few with good psychometric properties capable of producing data that are useful when evaluating clinical services.