Developing recovery oriented services and co-production in mental healthcare: Building- up on existing promising organisational practices

Recovery, as a patient-centred emergent transformative concept in mental healthcare, requires a change in the culture and practice of organisations at different levels. This paper investigates the potential of nurturing existing recovery oriented initiatives as promising practices for the re-orientation of mental healthcare provision. In the field of social innovation, promising practices are intended as very context-linked sustainable practices which open up possibilities of societal radical transformation based on people’s real needs and existing assets. Similarly, in mental healthcare services, the authors argue that emergent promising recovery oriented and co-produced practices can favour the shift from a traditional top-down culture to a more collaborative one. This paper is based on an experimental action-research project, Recovery CO–LAB, developed in collaboration with the Mental Health Department of Spedali Civili di Brescia, aiming to explore how service design could help the organisation to increase its orientation toward recovery.